2011 Hedge Fund Rising Stars: Standing Out from the Crowd

These talented investment professionals in our annual list of the hedge fund industry’s up-and-comers have proved their willingness to chart their own courses.

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Svetlana Lee, 37, arrived in the U.S. in 1992 from her native Bulgaria to attend college on a scholarship with $600 to her name. Faisal Syed, also 37, an alumnus of the prestigious Lawrence School, India’s oldest boarding school, moved to the U.S. in 1996 to get his MBA. Erez Kalir, 39, who has a JD from Yale Law School, worked in Washington as a staffer with the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the office of former vice president Al Gore before becoming a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Clayton DeGiacinto, 38, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a former Army airborne ranger.

Despite their disparate backgrounds, Lee, Syed, Kalir and DeGiacinto have at least two things in common: They all run their own hedge fund firms today, and they are all members of Institutional Investor’s 2011 Hedge Fund Rising Stars, our annual list of the hedge fund world’s up-and-coming talent. This year’s 30 Rising Stars were chosen not just for their professional expertise and reputations, but also for their willingness to think and do things differently. They represent the range and diversity that hedge funds embrace and from which their success is derived.

Click on the names below to read the profiles of the 30
talented investment professionals featured in our list of the
2011 Hedge Fund Rising Stars.
Name Firm
Eric Alt Hall Capital Partners
Jennifer Croswell SAC Capital Advisors
Clayton DeGiacinto Axonic Capital
Benjamin Durrant ICG Advisors
Jennifer Fan Arrowhawk Capital Partners
Joshua Fink Enso Capital Management
Pierre-Henri Flamand Edoma Capital Partners
Gareth Henry Fortress Investment Group
Erez Kalir Sabretooth Capital Management
Katie Kalvoda Newport Wealth Management
Edward Keller Morgan Stanley
Andrew Laurino Credit Suisse
Svetlana Lee Varna Capital
Gary Lehrman Lombard Odier Investment Managers
Greth Lester Perella Weinberg Partners
Greg Lippmann LibreMax Capital
J. Jason Mitchell GLG Partners
Gaurav Patankar Lockheed Martin Investment
Management Co.
Craig Perry Sabretooth Capital Management
Scott Pittman Mount Sinai Medical Center
Gregory Racz Hutchin Hill Capital
Angela Samfilippo Pine River Capital Management
Jill Schurtz Robeco-Sage Capital Management
Jonathan Shafter Boston Provident
Steven Simmons Maxim Group
Scott Sinclair Cascabel Management
Faisal Syed Pamli Capital Management
Morgan Sze Azentus Capital Management
Oliver Wiener BTIG
Patrick Wolff Grandmaster Capital Management

The process of selecting the 2011 Rising Stars began in March with a call for nominations. We didn’t stop there, doing additional research and reporting to vet those who were nominated and to identify other candidates. We think the list we have produced this year is the strongest yet.

Many of the 2011 Rising Stars are outsiders. Even some apparent industry insiders chose paths less taken. Oliver Wiener could have opted for a career with a major investment bank (he had worked as a summer intern at Goldman Sachs Group during college), but instead he has built a phenomenal trading business at the boutique firm BTIG. Scott Sinclair, a former Tiger Management Corp. analyst, spent eight years touring with his rock band before co-founding Cascabel Management. It is hard to be better connected than Joshua Fink, the son of BlackRock co-founder Laurence Fink; he made the bold decision to launch his own fund when he was just 23.

Oddly enough, it is the two most obvious insiders who have the most to prove. Former Goldman proprietary traders Pierre-Henri Flamand and Morgan Sze both left that firm in the past year to start their own hedge funds. Flamand and Sze were recognized as the top of their class at Goldman, but its traders have a mixed record when it comes to plying their skills on their own, and last year’s passage of the Volcker rule, which restricts banks’ ability to trade their own capital, is throwing plenty of former prop traders into the mix.

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