The people on Institutional Investor's 2025 list of Hedge Fund Rising Stars are doing everything from navigating post-Soviet economic lessons to decoding market risk to rewriting the future of hedge funds. Some work for legendary funds, others are bold entrepreneurs, some stars were friends from a college investing club — and all are contrarian.
This year, II honors ten “rising stars” who will help lead the industry through the current economic uncertainty and market turmoil and take on even more prominent roles as investors and managers get to the other side. On May 20, II published the stories of the first five rising stars, which can be found here.
This week, II completes its “rising stars” list with five more people who will ultimately help reshape the industry for the next generation: Agata Dornan, Dan McMurtrie, and Dan Rasmussen run their own funds — all with quite distinct and successful strategies. Steve Secundo and Matthew Sharp work at two of the world’s largest and most successful funds: Bridgewater Associates and Viking Global Investors, respectively.
The Rising Stars will be honored at the Allocators’ Choice Awards on September 18 at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City. You can register here. Last week II named the 2025 finalists for Endowment/Foundation CIO of the Year, Health Care System CIO of the Year, Public Pension CIO of the Year, and the Award for Leadership and Vision.
Agata Dornan, Chepstow Lane Capital
European credit is not typically a popular hedge fund strategy. Seldom has that been more true than when Agata Dornan left Soros Fund Management and started her own hedge fund, Chepstow Lane.
“We launched in one of the trickiest fundraising environments, when no one wanted to allocate to European credit because we were launching eight months after the invasion of Ukraine,” she explains.
Today, however, the turmoil in the U.S. capital markets is boosting Europe — and Chepstow, which manages $225 million. One reason is that capital has been moving out of the U.S. and into Europe, which many investors see as a beneficiary of the U.S.’s troubles.
Dornan notes that in April, during the height of the volatility, German debt “was very much treated as a safe haven.” And although the U.S. faces austerity, especially with the DOGE cuts and the Federal Reserve’s reluctance to reduce rates further, she says, “Germany is going to be investing €1 trillion in infrastructure and in defense, which it can do because it’s running a fiscal deficit.”
Chepstow is additionally protected from what Dornan calls “the tariff noise” by virtue of its investments’ being less exposed to it. “Because we have capped our AUM, we’re able to focus on less covered situations in Europe,” she says.
Dornan likes to bet against the consensus, and the fund gained more than 13 percent net in each of past two years. For example, Chepstow correctly predicted that European real estate would not follow U.S. real estate into the tank and that the peripheral economies of Europe — like Greece, Spain, and Portugal — would be big winners, as their economies have been growing about 2 percent a year while Germany’s growth has been flat.
The European theater is a natural for Dornan, the daughter of Polish immigrants. Her engineer father had defected and eventually landed a job at RCA in Princeton, New Jersey. Dornan grew up in relative privilege there, but when the family visited Warsaw every summer during the days when Poland was part of the Soviet bloc the privations were something of a shock. “Even if you had money, you couldn’t just go into a store and buy” because “planned economies don’t work” and the shelves were often empty, Dornan recalls. “These sorts of policy decisions are more than a sliding-doors moment; they’re extremely personal for me.”
Turning those personal experiences into a career choice happened when Dornan was at Middlebury College on a premed track. Required to take courses outside her field, she settled on an economics class and spent a year at the London School of Economics. “It was a lightbulb moment for me because so much of my personal family history was informed by economic policy,” she says.
Dornan decided she wanted to be an investment banker and even turned down a Fulbright scholarship to work for Deutsche Bank in New York, where she focused on the credit markets. She was there for two years before being hired as a credit analyst by Soros, which she left in 2005 to join Camulos Capital in London. She later spent three years at Blue Mountain Capital before returning to Soros in 2012, where she eventually became the European credit portfolio manager. She left Soros in 2020 and launched her own firm in 2021.
Dan McMurtrie, Tyro Partners
In 2015, Dan McMurtrie and his college investing club buddy Alex Draime decided to start a hedge fund. They named it Tyro Partners (tyro means novice in Latin). The moniker fit: The two were fairly recent graduates of the University of Notre Dame and had scraped together $3 million from family, friends, and their own pocketbooks for the launch.
They had spent their college years reading about hedge fund billionaires who started “with no money, no assets, and out of a dorm room or something,” McMurtrie recalls. “We figured that if we were going to take entrepreneurial risk, why not just do it when we’re very young, where if something goes horribly wrong, we can still bounce back?”
The men soon realized it’s harder than it looks. As a value-oriented long-short equity hedge fund, Tyro faced headwinds in an era of passive investing that shunned value investing. But Tyro has proved adept at managing risk and has not had a down year since 2015, when it had been investing for only a few months. In 2020, it was able to get seed capital from David Einhorn’s fund of funds, and now, as it approaches its tenth anniversary, Tyro has $300 million in assets and has recently landed its first institutional investor.
McMurtrie, who comes from a large family of Irish Catholic serial entrepreneurs, says he is used to the struggle, or what he terms “hopeless strife.” When he was growing up in Richmond, Virginia, his dad built a fast-food restaurant chain and his uncles were starting small businesses like gas stations. “They were what we would now call founders,” he says. “At the time, I interpreted it as guys who had schemes.”
By the time McMurtrie was a teenager, his efforts to understand why some of those schemes were successful and others were not led him to read books by Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett. “It all kind of started to make sense. I said, okay, there’s like a method to this, and there’s some logic to it.”
McMurtrie’s education got a boost when his parents, in the midst of a divorce, decided to send him to Fork Union Military Academy in Charlottesville, Virginia, for two years. McMurtrie was the top student there, and one of his professors recommended him to Phillips Academy–Andover, where he was something of a diversity hire. “I was first in my family to go to anywhere fancy,” says McMurtrie, who adds that Andover was “brutal.”
But he thrived. When he got to Notre Dame, McMurtrie spent most of his time learning about investing, including during a stint as president of the school’s investment club. That’s where he met Draime, who was the club’s previous president.
“Anybody I met around markets, I would literally be like, Hey, can I come get you a coffee? And I would go into their offices and just sit there and ask questions.” That behavior continued after he and Draime started Tyro. The two had zero Wall Street connections “because we were children,” quips McMurtrie. But eventually these conversations — and some good investments — got them in the door at Einhorn’s fund of funds.
They were told that Einhorn would turn to a Bloomberg terminal to check their numbers, so the duo went out and bought access to one of their own — and promptly discovered that Bloomberg’s numbers for the company they were pitching were inaccurate.
As they began their presentation, Einhorn went to check their thesis on Bloomberg. “Right on schedule, when we start talking about it, he jumps in and says he thinks we’ve misstated an accounting number. And we’re like, ‘Okay, are you looking at this page on Bloomberg?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes.’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, open up the 10-Q, and you’ll see here it’s a misstated number.’”
After some back-and-forth, Einhorn had to agree, and in 2019 decided to give Tyro seed capital and publicly endorse the fund.
Dan Rasmussen, Verdad Advisers
For several years after Dan Rasmussen’s 2018 essay “Private Equity: Overvalued and Overrated?” was published, the hedge fund manager admits, “you could have said, ‘Hey, Dan, you’re just wrong.’” Leverage in private equity seemed manageable, he says, and investors kept throwing money at the asset class, which everyone thought was “amazing.”
Now, however, the founder of Verdad is feeling vindicated. “I wanted to do something that was non-consensus and contrarian,” he says of his earlier view. These days, he is only slightly less contrarian, predicting that “investors’ love affair with privates is over.” Returns are trailing, exits have dried up, fundraising has diminished amid the lack of distributions, and even Ivy League endowments are reportedly having trouble selling their stakes in the secondary market. “There’s no new pool of capital. Everyone who wanted to get in or was open to getting in is up to the gills in this stuff,” he explains.
Rasmussen developed his initial critique while working at Bain Capital Private Equity for four years after graduating from Harvard in 2009. He says it is also what he learned at Bain that led him to launch his hedge fund (with only $8 million) in 2014. At the time, he was studying for an MBA at Stanford University.
“The lesson to be learned was that if you bought small companies with a reasonable amount of debt at very low prices, you could do really well because you had so many different ways to win,” he says. Rasmussen gravitated to undervalued international markets and eventually settled on Japan for his first fund. “There were so many small companies. They were very cheap. Debt was free. There was no bankruptcy in Japan,” he notes.
Verdad’s Japan fund now accounts for about 25 percent of the firm’s assets, which hit the $1 billion mark in early 2024. Verdad, which is the Spanish word for truth, does no marketing outside of writing research reports that some 30,000 people receive each week. “Almost all of our money has come from inbounds of people saying, ‘Hey, I read your research. I’d like to invest in you,’” he says. (Rasmussen has also penned two books: American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, based on his Harvard senior thesis, and The Humble Investor: How to Find a Winning Edge in a Surprising World, a compilation of his writings on investment.)
Another offering, a market-neutral global macro fund, has been this year’s biggest winner. It was up 15.6 percent in the first quarter, according to an investor. (The Japan fund has gained about 9 percent since inception in 2021.)
But not everything has been a home run, Rasmussen allows. Verdad’s opportunity funds got off to a rough start. The idea was to buy small, cheap companies. “There was a period from 2018 to 2020 where that was a horrible, horrible strategy. I call it the value apocalypse, where everything we invested in went wrong. And by the beginning of 2020, I felt like I was the world’s worst investor and I had chosen the wrong career,” he says.
After studying why those stocks did so poorly, his team came up with a new thesis: Small-caps would outperform only during periods of crisis. That idea might have saved Verdad. It began raising money for an opportunity fund in early 2020, and then Covid hit. “We had a chance to go and deploy the money in the summer of 2020, and that ended up being a total home run.” They returned the capital the next year and started raising another opportunity fund.
That fund is now waiting for the next crisis — defined by Verdad as a period when high-yield spreads go above 600 basis points — to start investing. Says Rasmussen: “When everyone else is panicking, we’re the ones with capital that we draw down in a way that’s thoughtful so that we’re not caught in the fog of war.”
Steve Secundo, Bridgewater Associates
When Steve Secundo received his master’s degree in quantitative finance from Fordham Gabelli School of Business on September 1, 2008, he was excited for a career in finance and interviewed at all the major banks. Two weeks later, however, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and no one was hiring. No one except for Bridgewater Associates, the giant hedge fund that was managing to profit from the crisis. Secundo had never heard of it.
“I didn’t really know what a hedge fund did, but one didn’t have many offers out there, so you can’t be that much of a chooser in a massive global recession,” he explains. At Bridgewater, Secundo quickly learned that markets operated differently from what he’d learned in a textbook, which he found exhilarating. “I was hooked from day one,” he says.
Growing up outside of Philadelphia, Secundo loved sports and says he thought for “an embarrassingly long time” that he would be a professional athlete. He played football and baseball at Wesleyan University, where he received his undergraduate degree. That interest in sports is why he thinks the Bridgewater culture suits him. “It’s pushing yourself and others as far as you go, which connects a lot back to playing athletics where you had a lot of teamwork, and you had to push yourself very hard. You can’t let your teammates down. So that was a very easy transition for me.”
Secundo started in the trading department, building automated systems for traders, before moving into the global currency research group, where he rose from junior analyst to investor. “There’s so many different players in the world,” says Secundo, whose job was to track where the money goes, size up the players and try to anticipate the currency moves. “The problem is just so complex and there’s never one right answer,” he says.
Since 2016, Secundo has been in a client-facing role at Bridgewater. He is now a senior portfolio strategist and a contributor and editor for Bridgewater Daily Observations. “What I love is I get to talk to clients every single day.” He says he has talked to 500 different clients during the past two years.
“It feels like a game. The lights are on,” he says, continuing the sports metaphor. “You can prepare as much as you want, but just like a game, you can’t prepare for literally every outcome.”
These days, he says, clients’ biggest worry is the impact of Trump’s ever-changing tariff regime. Late last year, Bridgewater co-CIO Greg Jensen published a piece in The Wall Street Journal that argued that the globalization of the past several decades was being replaced by a new type of mercantilism, an economic isolationist movement that dates back to the 18th century.
“The tariff numbers have come down, but they’re still the highest that they’ve been since 1900,” notes Secundo, who contributed to Jensen’s piece. “The tail risks have been taken off the table in the near term, at least. But these tariffs are something that we have not seen since the 1920s, 1930s. So these are still very large numbers.”
Although Bridgewater doesn’t think the outcome of Trump’s tariffs will be a “disaster,” Secundo says, “we think it’s going to be worse than what some markets are pricing,” given that they have bounced back from their April lows “pretty significantly.” He says Bridgewater is positioning its portfolios for slower growth than is being discounted in both the stock and bond markets.
Matthew Sharp, Viking Global Investors
In less than five years on the job, Matthew Sharp had worked his way up to become a managing director at hedge fund Suvretta Capital Management. Then, in 2022, he took what appeared to be a step down by going to Viking Global as a senior analyst.
The career potential at Viking, he thought, would ultimately be higher. And that’s not just because Viking is one of the most successful hedge funds of all time. It’s because there, in contrast to hedge funds outside of the big pod shops, any senior analyst who becomes a portfolio manager can manage his own capital with considerable flexibility and authority over that capital.
That’s what happened to Sharp, who was promoted to portfolio manager after only two years on the job in New York. Starting out covering a small portion of consumer names, he took over the entire sector after a reshuffling of people that began when Ning Jin, Viking’s CIO, left to form his own hedge fund in August 2024 and Justin Walsh, the head of consumer and industrials, became CIO.
Both mentored Sharp under Viking’s apprenticeship model, which lets analysts work closely with portfolio managers. The model has given the firm a reputation for excellence in training talent and, along with the ability to eventually manage capital, is considered a big reason that a number of Viking portfolio managers have gone on to launch their own funds.
Despite his success in the hedge fund world, Sharp hadn’t planned on a career in finance. In fact, he wanted to join the CIA because of a fascination with the role the U.S. plays in the world. He grew up in Locust Valley, Long Island, and entered the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University — a pipeline to the foreign service, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA.
Sharp did have some exposure to finance; his mother spent part of her career as an operational adviser to Cerberus Capital Management. But what turned his interests in that direction was an intellectual curiosity to understand the way the world works. Finance explained it better than government, he decided.
After receiving a bachelor of science degree in foreign service in 2010, Sharp joined Credit Suisse as an analyst in the biotech investment banking group. He worked there for two years, then spent two years at Carlyle before moving into the hedge fund world.
In 2015, Sharp joined Suvretta covering healthcare out of San Francisco, where he worked for six and a half years. After three years, he asked founder Aaron Cowen if there was a path to becoming a partner — called a managing director at Suvretta — and was told he would have to find a sector that was not being covered by another analyst. That advice led Sharp to a focus on a little-covered area in the consumer sector: payments, fintech, and business services. His success in that field led him to being named a managing director in 2019.
When he moved to Viking, Sharp initially covered the same area. Eventually, his focus grew to encompass the entire consumer sector. Viking has about $50 billion in total assets, with some $16 billion in private markets and the rest invested in the public markets. Founder and CEO O. Andreas Halvorsen is responsible for all firm-wide matters and oversees the firm’s investment activities, including capital allocation. In addition to CIO Justin Walsh, Viking has seven portfolio managers.
