Meet Stephanie Cohen, the Goldman Sachs exec with a Big Tech plan to take on Main Street
Hello readers!
Happy Saturday, and welcome to Insider Finance. Here's a rundown of the must-know stories from the past week:
- Inside the rise of Stephanie Cohen, the Goldman Sachs dealmaker leading a Main Street push
- 50 insiders tell all on Blackstone's Jon Gray
- How hedge funds are snooping on Reddit to spot the next GameStop
- Bank of America announced a new crop of MDs - we saw the names
Don't miss these webinars next week:
- Feb. 2: A conversation with Insider's markets gurus on the GameStop and Reddit-trader phenomenon
- Feb. 3: Execs from Goldman Sachs, Lead Edge Capital, and Latham & Watkins reveal what's on tap for the red-hot IPO market in 2021
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Inside the rise of Stephanie Cohen, the Goldman Sachs dealmaker leading a make-or-break push to take on Main Street
When Adena Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, hosted a dozen executives for dinner at her home in June 2018, it marked the first encounter for one of Wall Street's most senior women and another up-and-comer.
Stephanie Cohen, then a chief strategy officer at Goldman Sachs, impressed Friedman with her penchant for bringing multiple perspectives to bear on a conversation.
"She's witty and funny. She's incredibly smart. And she's what I call a three-dimensional thinker," Friedman told Insider. "So it's just a lot of fun."
Cohen is now a formidable Wall Street figure in her own right. Six weeks after meeting Friedman, Cohen became the youngest person to join Goldman's management committee. Last November, she and Tucker York, credited with building the bank's private wealth business, were handed oversight of Goldman's consumer and wealth-management division, the home of grand ambitions to go toe to toe with JPMorgan in consumer banking.
You can read our full profile here
How hedge funds are tracking Reddit posts to protect their portfolios after the Wall Street Bets crowd helped tank Melvin Capital's short positions
Retail investors - especially from the subreddit Wall Street Bets - helped force one of the top-performing hedge funds of the past half-decade to secure billions in emergency funding from two ultracompetitive peers.
Now funds are planning to keep as close of an eye as possible on the social-media platform. One data scientist at a fund told Insider they created a scraping tool this weekend to monitor tickers being discussed on the site to make sure their fund's short book isn't caught in the next "YOLO" trade. Thinknum, a web-scraping data provider, is in the process of building a Reddit-specific dataset after insane client demand.
Here's what you need to know:
- How hedge funds are tracking Wall Street Bets
- Robinhood has been beefing up its legal firepower with these 11 lawyers including SEC veterans and a Goldman Sachs in-house counsel
- How democratizing investing has paved the way for the meme stock moment, according to the CEO of a fintech that powers investing for Revolut and Cash App
Jon Gray is the future of Blackstone
Winning over hot businesses that have their pick of investors has become one of Jon Gray's most visible successes in the three years since he stepped into the role of president and chief operating officer at Blackstone.
Insider talked to 50 people who know Gray - including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Bumble CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd - about his path to the top of the alternative-asset management giant.
Here's how the superinvestor consolidated power, elbowed out rivals, and is remaking the firm in his golden-boy image
Bank of America has promoted 86 managing directors in its sales and trading, research, and operations groups
Bank of America announced its new crop of managing directors this week, promoting 86 people across its sales and trading, research, and operations groups - a 16% uptick from last year's tally.
The firm's new managing directors were notified last year toward the end of the fourth quarter, according to people familiar with the matter, but the company just announced the promotions internally on Thursday.
Here's a list of all the names
Other stories readers loved this week
- E-discovery company Reveal just got a $200 million investment and bought a data firm. Its CEO lays out its roadmap for beating out a major rival
- 7 insiders from firms like Grayscale, Galaxy Digital, and TD Ameritrade explain how to land a job in crypto trading and investing
- Coca-Cola's goals for its law firms prioritize Black lawyers, long overlooked by Big Law, in push for diversity
- Here's how PJ Solomon's new COO is thinking about the future of dealmaking: 'We don't need to be in the middle of Manhattan'
- Here's what billionaire Apollo CEO Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for, from finding billions in tax savings to moving his yacht
- Meet Kim Posnett, the youngest head of a powerful team inside Goldman Sachs' investment bank that's focused on pitching innovative ways to get deals done