Wall Street rising stars: 25 top young investors, traders, and dealmakers at firms like Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and JPMorgan

Anton got an early start in finance, buying stocks in high school during the 2008 financial crisis. Some bets, like buying Bank of America stock at its trough, paid off. (He chalks up less-successful bets, such as one on Bear Stearns, to experience.)

This introduction came in handy for his first job after college as a financial institutions group analyst at Credit Suisse’s investment bank. He spent two years there and another two at Kohlberg and Company before joining Apollo in 2018.

The 32-year-old principal’s work runs the gamut from insurance to agriculture. He helped raise capital for Apollo’s retirement services unit, Athene, by developing a fundraising strategy that allows third parties to invest alongside the firm. These funding vehicles, or “sidecars,” have raised $9.3 billion in committed capital as of June 30. 

Anton was also Apollo’s day-to-day lead on Vallourec, the French steel giant. Apollo sold its 28% stake for 955 million euros, about $1.04 billion, in March. Anton helped lead the acquisition of Vallourec during the COVID-19 pandemic and the firm’s restructuring, which included moving operations from Germany to Brazil. He anticipates more opportunistic metals deals on the horizon as prices decline. 

Anton, who majored in history at Princeton, credits his versatility to his fondness for learning about different sectors and the successes and failures in each field.

“A lot of stuff has been done before,” he said. “If you have the curiosity and build up your knowledge of the past, I’ve found that to be really beneficial as you think about covering new sectors or moving to a new job.”

As Apollo courts wealthy individuals, Anton is developing new investment products that allow the firm to partially cash out quarterly or monthly in exchange for somewhat lower returns. Apollo sells about $1 billion a month in semiliquid products spanning private credit and real assets.

“It’s going to be a really big growth area for the firm,” he said.

Cecil, one of two deputy chief investment officers at $108 billion Bridgewater Associates, was so ready to work full time at the firm that he dropped out of Columbia University to jump-start his career. 

“The thing I really liked was the intensity, the competitive nature of markets, the authenticity of Bridgewater’s culture,” Cecil, who first interned at the firm before joining full time in 2017, said. 

In his current role, he works closely with co-CIO Greg Jensen to gather insights and research from different teams and turn them into trades for the flagship strategy, Pure Alpha, which was up more than 14% through the first half of the year. 

“The oversight is about innovation — what’s the big thing we might be missing?” Cecil said. 

Reams of deep research don’t go far if there’s not “a trader’s mentality” to actually extract “a piece of alpha” from them, he said. He said he’s constantly thinking about how to make sure the portfolio is “the expression of the things we believe about the world.” 

He was promoted to his current role at the start of this year after making his name at the firm with his research on currencies. That background has pushed him to search beyond stock and bond markets for alpha — and to consider how different assets will work in a single portfolio.

“There’s a lot more room for us to think about how all these asset classes come together,” he said.

White started his career working in franchising for Burger King, where his job was to bring on larger, better-capitalized franchisees, which usually turned out to be a PE firm or a family office. 

“The stories from the families and the entrepreneurs and the funds and their thesis were super interesting to me,” he said. “So I decided to go to school and scale that up.”

After completing his MBA at Northwestern in 2017, White joined Bank of America’s consumer and retail investment banking team in New York. He’s since played a key role in introducing a new focus for Bank of America as part of its emerging growth and regional coverage team.

“A lot of our strategy was to take all the resources and all the talent that we were putting against bulge-bracket opportunities and bring it to the middle market and try and find opportunities that normally Bank America would not have been as tuned in to,” White said.

He took “a leap of faith” and joined the team in Chicago in 2019.

“It was kind of full circle, having started my career with entrepreneurs,” said White, who now advises family-owned businesses, founders, and early investors in those companies to deepen the bank’s relationships in private capital markets and attach that to its public capital markets business.

Even in a time of muted IPOs, White led a large industrial IPO this year. In 2023, he was key in advising a large financial sponsor client in a take-private transaction in healthcare. He also helped lead a buy-side transaction for a family-owned consumer business, where Bank of America was both the advisor and financing partner to the client. 

Since White joined the Chicago team, he has helped it grow from three to 25 people. His advice to young professionals in the industry is to “be your own feedback loop.” 

“Don’t wait for someone to tell you something did or didn’t go well. Assess every situation yourself, almost obsessively think about, ‘How can I have done that better?'”

Cardona approaches her often high-pressure job as a lead banker at RBC with a perspective not many on Wall Street possess.

“I was illegal for 15 years of my life. I had to go through a lot of issues just getting through school,” said Cardona of her move to New Jersey from Manizales, Colombia, when she was just 6 years old. “These are really big, real-world problems that I had to face on my own. So working, I would say I’m probably the most levelheaded of anyone on the team, because nothing really is that serious.”

Cardona worked multiple jobs to pay her way through her financial engineering degree at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. She landed a spot in RBC’s 2016 summer investment-banking internship and joined the firm once she graduated. Over the past six years, she’s risen from analyst to vice president.

As a member of RBC’s communications, media, and entertainment banking team, Cardona worked on Apollo Global Management’s $5 billion acquisition of Cox Media Group in 2019, the first and largest LBO in the TV broadcasting industry. She also helped close the radio broadcasting company MediaCo’s acquisition of Estrella Media earlier this year.

The COVID pandemic and subsequent interest-rate hikes stalled a lot of deal flow in her coverage area, but Cardona said she has high hopes for what’s in store in the next year or so. She’s seeing a lot of clients and media company owners waiting for the election and interest-rate cuts to play out. 

She aims to be a mentor to young Latinos who aspire to go into banking. This year, she’s leading a new program where she and other RBC employees will mentor 30 high schoolers from three New York City public schools.

Cardona’s message to other Wall Street hopefuls is to be unapologetically persistent, she said. “If I had let any doubt fill my mind in these 10 years, I would not be here. I was set up to not be here, actually.”

Wilson is a top credit underwriter at Blue Owl Capital, overseeing nearly $5 billion in deals across some 20 transactions in her five years there. 

Wilson was primed early on for a life in leveraged finance thanks to some formative bonding moments with her mother over, well, bonds. She has fond memories of visiting her mom — now retired after 25 years working in municipal bonds — on the Deutsche Bank trading floor in Boston and playing around with the Bloomberg Terminal. This inspired a fascination with how companies operate and also a belief that women could succeed in the male-dominated finance industry. 

Years later, after graduating from Boston College in 2015, Wilson joined a mid-market credit firm as the only woman on a six-person investment team analyst class. 

“I didn’t have any real reservations or qualms about joining an analyst class where I was the only woman,” Wilson said. 

She moved to Blue Owl, then known as Owl Rock, as an associate in 2019 and quickly garnered trust and was given more responsibilities by senior leaders. She credits her success, in part, to her knack for fastidious preparation — anticipating the critical information a busy exec may need and having concise answers at the ready. 

Wilson, who was promoted to vice president in January, has helped underwrite and execute loans to firms including Inspira Financial and Worldwide Clinical Trials, and in 2020, she also took a lead role in Blue Owl’s small-business lending program during the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided working capital to 11 borrowers.

She has watched private credit’s explosion into a $2 trillion market firsthand. Blue Owl’s credit AUM has grown from roughly $15 billion when she joined to over $95 billion today. Even as deal sizes have ballooned — what were once $1 billion transactions are now commonly $3 billion to $5 billion or more — her approach hasn’t.

“Fundamentally, the job hasn’t changed, but the scale and scope of opportunities has grown,” Wilson said.

When Dan joined Citadel Securities in 2022, he was given an ambitious mandate to establish the firm’s presence in Japan. 

Dan, who was born in China and grew up in Japan, was mostly starting from scratch.

Citadel Securities had neither Japanese clients nor an office in Japan, and Dan, one of the first hires on his team, worked mostly as a one-man show advising clients on their fixed-income trades. But as one of the largest foreign holders of US Treasurys with more than $1 trillion in holdings, Japan represented an untapped gold rush for Ken Griffin’s market maker. 

Citadel Securities now has trading relationships with at least 30 top fixed-income firms in Japan, Dan said, covering nearly all the major investment firms in the country.

As a senior vice president of fixed-income sales, Dan offers his perspective on the economy and market moves to Japanese banks, asset managers, pensions, and life insurance companies. From his home base in New York, he acts as a sounding board for clients’ investment ideas to ultimately win more trades for Citadel Securities. 

Before Citadel Securities, Dan spent the prior 10 years fostering relationships with Japanese financial institutions for Deutsche Bank, where he worked on the fixed-income sales team. Becoming a part of clients’ everyday routines has also helped Dan grow market share. 

Dan usually starts and ends his day the same way: on the phone with his clients. He gives them market updates every day over the phone; for some key clients, that’s been the case for the last five years, he said. 

“Consistency is key. I think no matter what you do,” Dan said, “do it every day so that clients remember you, and then it becomes their custom to read your comments.”

Elliott was Bank of America’s top vice president globally in interest-rate sales last year, generating nearly $30 million from large hedge-fund clients — production more in line with directors and managing directors. 

There’s no obvious connection between Elliott’s background and his ascendance in Bank of America’s global markets division. How does food services and catering experience translate into elite hedge-fund sales? 

Elliott grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, the son of two small-business entrepreneurs. His father ran a cleaning business and his mother a catering company, which meant a tenacious approach to work “was just kind of drilled into me — the idea of outworking everyone else in order to shine, in order to get visibility,” he said. That ethic helped him earn his first internship in high school when the CEO of a food-procurement corporation saw Elliott’s hustle at one of his mother’s catering jobs and offered him an opportunity typically reserved for college students. 

Wall Street didn’t emerge as a career path until the summer before his sophomore year at Duke when he attended a Bank of America diversity summit. “It was terrifying because I knew nothing about finance, but it was amazing to see senior people who looked like me could succeed on Wall Street,” Elliott said. He didn’t let lack of expertise discourage him from a great opportunity, studying to get up to speed after the bank offered him a summer internship. “I didn’t have the most technical finance background, but I did consider myself, in most rooms I’d go into, the hardest worker.” 

But success serving hedge funds requires savvy, not just intensity. Elliott said he treats every client meeting or dinner as if it’s the most important moment of the day, and he comes armed with strategies and ideas that cut against the grain.

“You don’t want to be a salesperson that always agrees with the client,” Elliott said. “You want to have different perspectives for them to analyze.”

Elliott also helps further the company diversity efforts that once helped him, including serving as recruiting cochair for Bank of America’s group committed to developing and engaging African American leaders.

No workday for Williams has been the same for nearly a decade.

Williams was the first hire by the activist lawyer David Rosewater for Morgan Stanley’s new shareholder activism and corporate defense team in 2015. Since then, Williams has worked for General Motors as the automaker beat back proposals from David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital to create two classes of stock and Bristol Myers Squibb, which came under attack from the activist Starboard Value over its $74 billion acquisition of Celgene in 2019. 

“I always have loved the strategic aspect of it,” she said.

“There is no typical theme; there is no typical evolution. Each client is different.” 

Defense is in her blood — her father’s a retired vice admiral in the Navy, and her brother is a US Naval Academy graduate. While she considered the same path for herself, she didn’t see herself becoming an officer for the long term. 

Instead, she gets to do “my own version of defense, in finance.”

“My parents tell everyone I’m still in the family defense business,” she said.

Her focus is on keeping Morgan Stanley’s well-regarded team among the industry’s leaders while also “constantly evolving.” While the big-name activism campaigns and contentious proxy fights get the most headlines, she relishes working with companies on their strategies preemptively. 

“Every situation is incredibly unique,” Williams, who has worked on hundreds of different defense strategies over the years, said.

“You help them think through and plan how they can control their own destiny,” she added.

Eid-Holm considers himself a “social nerd.”

The 32-year-old is a principal at Ares Infrastructure Opportunities, a $12 billion arm of the Los Angeles-based alternative asset manager Ares Management, where he focuses on digital assets, including data centers. 

“I’m a math person, but I also like to talk to people,” Eid-Holm said. 

That flexibility comes in handy in a business that sits at a complicated intersection between real estate and the utility and technology industries.

“Often the hardest part of getting a project off the ground is not an engineering problem; it’s getting the right permits, working with the community,” Eid-Holm said.

Data-center development is booming, driven in large part by the proliferating need for the computing power and storage necessary to develop and commercialize artificial intelligence. Eid-Holm has helped Ares push into the asset class, including an undisclosed investment by the company in Prime Data Centers, a prominent data center developer and operator. 

As power has been exhausted on the grid, Eid-Holm has had to get creative.

“Traditionally, the utility would build all the transmission lines and a substation next to the data center,” Eid-Holm said. “We’re increasingly seeing an opportunity/requirement for the developer to take on more and more of that role.” 

Eid-Holm said he began to notice investment opportunities in the data-center space in the mid-2010s when he was a young executive at Deutsche Bank. 

“One deal the first year became two deals the next year became my full-time job,” he said. “For me, it’s been: Work very hard, and lean into good opportunities.”

Eid-Holm was raised in Ottawa and came to New York to work in finance after graduating from the University of Waterloo. He has a fiancé and said he often reads books “directly or tangentially related to my job” in his free time. 

“I’m very passionate about what I do,” he said. “I work too hard for it to be only about financial results.”

Spending her first years at BlackRock as an analyst in its corporate mergers-and-acquisitions advisory arm gave Ding, now an infrastructure investor, a front-row seat to the firm’s push into private markets.

The Princeton grad joined BlackRock in 2015 after a stint at the investment firm Harding Loevner. In the years she spent on the corporate strategy team, BlackRock acquired First Reserve Corporation’s energy-infrastructure investment platform and the private credit firm Tennenbaum Capital Partners. More recently, BlackRock made its biggest push into private markets, agreeing to buy Global Infrastructure Partners for $12.5 billion. 

The chance to learn where the world’s largest asset manager was placing its bets was a “very compelling place to be,” she said, and it ultimately convinced her to join the infrastructure business in 2019. 

As the head of Americas for BlackRock’s infrastructure solutions unit, Ding advises on about $15 billion in capital commitments and oversees the origination, underwriting, and management of infrastructure investment opportunities in the US, Canada, and Latin America. She has directly led or co-led over $2 billion of investments, ranging from renewable energy to data-center businesses to waste-management companies.

She sees a “tremendous amount of opportunity” in companies related to energy transition, security, and reliability. She also focuses on the infrastructure players set to benefit from the decarbonization of carbon-emitting industries such as transportation and waste.

Her path to private markets was influenced by her mentor, the late Jerry Kenney, an advisor to BlackRock and a former Merrill Lynch executive who led the bank’s expansion into investment banking. As an analyst, Ding took on side projects for Kenney, who was working on ways to grow BlackRock’s alternative-investments business. 

Ding says she continues to raise her hand to take on extra work her team needs to succeed.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a director or a VP and you consider it analyst-level work,” she said. “If it needs to get done to move the business or a team forward, you just do it.”

Portfolio manager Gnedin grew up in a family full of astrophysicists and rocket scientists — which is part of the reason she never wanted to be one. 

“I guess for me, acting out was choosing the econ path,” Gnedin said. The Princeton alum was inspired by her economist grandfather, the “lone black sheep” of the family who “was always the most interesting man at any dinner party,” she said. 

But after two years as an analyst in investment banking, Gnedin, “a little bit jaded on finance,” went in search of something new. In 2017, she landed a position at the largest publicly traded hedge fund, Man Group, where Gnedin has forged a path that marries her family’s backgrounds. 

Gnedin originally joined as a quantitative researcher building algorithms for the firm’s systematic investment arm, which relies on mathematical models to make investment decisions. One algorithm that Gnedin developed systematically reviewed existing model performance and identified which models should be retired. Since launching in 2019, the algorithm, one of the first of its kind at the firm, has led to about two to three models a year being dropped, she said.

In 2020, Gnedin moved to the portfolio management side of the business, where she directly manages about $1.4 billion in equities in developed markets. As a quant PM, Gnedin said her job is more about managing models than specific stocks. She still spends plenty of time researching modeling techniques in old textbooks and tinkering with algorithms. 

When she’s not nose-deep in economic research or alternative datasets, you can likely find the San Franciscan taking in the views on the Stonewall-Panoramic Trail in the East Bay with her husky.

At JPMorgan Asset Management, Lenihan manages $21 billion in 8,000 customizable portfolios that provide generous tax advantages for the firm’s clients.

He is an architect of the bank’s booming Tax Smart Separately Managed Account platform, which leverages the technology of 55ip, a fintech that Lenihan helped identify for a partnership and JPMorgan then acquired. The dual role of fund manager and product developer combines his interest in finance with his engineering background. 

An engineer by training, Lenihan began his career monitoring the quality of suppliers’ parts at Chrysler. Soon, however, he found himself thinking more about the economics of how truck and car parts played into the company’s profitability than the manufacturing aspect. 

Hung up on these questions, and after talking to friends from the University of Michigan about their finance internships, Lenihan decided he wanted to know more about investing. He was hired into a rotational analyst program for JPMorgan’s private bank, and to get closer to an investing role, he took on additional projects with portfolio managers and earned his CFA. 

Learning about how companies make money, why they should be financed, or their value, was “really intriguing to me,” Lenihan, who also has an MBA from Wharton, said. “And as I got there, it was something that I just kind of fell in love with — really dove in since day one.”

His programming skills and willingness to pitch in on different projects led to opportunities like building out the firm’s robo-advisor with his mentor, Ted Dimig. Lenihan led the development of a product that required buy-in from across internal tech teams, third-party partners, and operations.

“That was the genesis of a lot of my passion and love for that dual-hat role was being able to flex multiple skill sets,” he said.

He still dedicates time to finding fintech partners to work with or acquire. Lenihan also launched a mentoring program that seeks to build connectivity among different teams at the asset manager. 

“I have learned firsthand about how successful you can be with those close partnerships when you work together, ” he said.