Hedge Fund Rising Stars: Grace Gu

Grace Gu
BlackRock
As quantitative credentials go, it’s hard to get much better than Grace Gu’s. She holds a BS in electrical engineering and an MS in financial mathematics from Stanford University, which with its close ties to Silicon Valley is not known for producing slouches on such subjects. And Gu proved to be anything but, receiving both the prestigious top undergraduate President’s Scholarship and the Frederick Terman Award, given to the top 5 percent of engineering students. She was also the gold medalist of the Singapore Physics Olympiad in 2000. However, with a college internship at Goldman, Sachs & Co. under her belt and a series of mentors encouraging her to stay in finance, Gu ultimately chose finance over the Google route. She went back to Goldman and became a portfolio manager on its Global Alpha hedge fund. In 2008, BlackRock hired her, showing how much that firm values the kind of analytical, quantitative thinking the former physics whiz excels at. At 30, Gu is the lead portfolio manager on BlackRock’s multistrategy fund of hedge funds.