Michael Liberman
No. 24
Chief Operating Officer
BlueMountain Capital Management
From BlueMountain Capital Management’s formation in 2003, co-founders Andrew Feldstein and Stephen Siderow placed a heavy emphasis on technology to enable opportunistic execution of trading strategies that exploited inefficiencies in credit markets. “Culturally, it was very important to us,” says COO and technology architect Michael Liberman, 47, who joined New York–based BlueMountain in 2004. Today the $7 billion hedge fund firm enjoys a best-in-class reputation. Its high-tech focus helped lure Liberman away from Goldman Sachs Group, where he was head of global interest rate product strategies, responsible for risk analytics and systems, quantitative research and market strategies. A BlueMountain managing principal who also serves as chief risk officer, the Brandeis University graduate (he has a BS and an MA in mathematics) oversaw risk and derivatives systems in the 1990s at J.P. Morgan & Co., where he and Feldstein were colleagues. Before that Liberman developed loan portfolio analytics for Citibank, worked on database and telecommunications software in Silicon Valley and continued his graduate math studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of BlueMountain’s trading technology requirements center on pricing and “processing huge amounts of data in a very effective and efficient way,” as Liberman puts it. The management mentality is not unlike that of Silicon Valley, he notes: “In fact, we are attracting similar types of talent and competing for it with the likes of Twitter and Netflix.”
