Meet 2018's Rising Stars of Wall Street shaking up investing, trading, and dealmaking

Mandy Xu is the chief equity-derivatives strategist at Credit Suisse and a director in the global markets division in New York. She concentrates on index and ETF volatility research, with a focus on cross-asset drivers of equity volatility.

As a strategist, Xu sets volatility outlooks for the desk, publishes regular market commentaries, and provides trading ideas for clients. She also helps clients incorporate the use of derivatives in their portfolios.

Xu specializes in finding mispricings in volatility markets across asset classes. A notable example: One of the desk's largest clients called in May and requested to trade "The Mandy," a nickname given by the client to refer to the trade she'd recommended. In this strategy, she had pointed out that the downside risks in the European equity market were elevated amid a worsening geopolitical situation in Italy, while the market at the time was underpricing those risks.

Another example of her best calls this year included recommending that clients go long the energy E&P sector based on divergences in the volatility of oil versus that of energy stocks.

Xu interned at Credit Suisse during the summer of 2008 and joined the bank in 2010 as a full-time analyst. She was promoted to chief strategist at age 28. She had a stint at the boutique investment bank E.J. McKay in Shanghai as a cross-border M&A analyst.

Xu holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University. She mentors at-risk youth through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and is a committee lead in the CS Americas Women's Network.

Sims Lansing learned the value of hard work at an early age, working at a grocery store at 14. As a teenager, he racked up wrestling accolades — state champion, All American high-school team — before joining Princeton's team. A back injury cut his career short, but he sought to translate his discipline from athletics to his professional life. The political-economy major interned at Lehman Brothers after his sophomore year, in 2008, and then at Rothschild after his junior year, where he went full-time after graduation.

He worked at investment manager Trafelet and two funds seeded by Tiger Management before founding his own fund, called Lansing Management. He launched in the first quarter of 2017 with $55 million of capital, now up to $175 million. The four-person fund, which invests in 10-20 small- and mid-cap stocks, returned 31.6% net in its first year and 8.8% through the third quarter.

While growing up in central New Jersey, Michael Elanjian learned about Wall Street at his investment-banker father's right hip. Finance was the only career that Elanjian really considered. He now runs digital strategy for JPMorgan's corporate and investment bank, partnering with the division's business lines to define, shape, and implement their tech strategies. He'll play a key role in deploying $11 billion in annual tech spending into products and strategies to create the Wall Street of tomorrow.

Before joining JPMorgan in April, Elanjian spent his entire career at Goldman Sachs. After interning at the investment bank, Elanjian wrapped up college at Babson early, departing with summa cum laude honors and degrees in computational finance, finance, and entrepreneurship.

He joined the Goldman's Principal Strategic Investments unit, where he led investments and executed strategies into areas such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and electronic trading. When he's not trying to think of how to disrupt the industry, Elanjian likes to surf with his wife off the New Jersey coast.

Michael Sonnenshein is a managing director at Grayscale Investments, one of the world's largest digital-asset managers. The cryptocurrency investment arm of the Digital Currency Group, the firm manages $1.5 billion assets and has a total of nine investment products.

At Grayscale, Michael oversees a variety of responsibilities, including sales, business development, product development, and asset raising.

He started his crypto career leading sales and asset raising for Bitcoin Investment Trust at SecondMarket — which was run by early crypto investor and DCG founder Barry Silbert — in January 2014. The investment vehicle at the time had $60 million in assets under management and one investment product. After Nasdaq acquired SecondMarket, the team working on the Bitcoin trust rebranded into Grayscale Investments. Now the firm has launched a family of products, and assets under management have grown exponentially.

Michael previously worked for Bank of America, Barclays, and, most recently, JPMorgan. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Emory University and an MBA from New York University.

Tanaka Maswoswe, a Yale alumnus, began his finance career in investment banking. He interned at Barclays in the summer of 2005 through the education nonprofit SEO. He spent two years at the bank after graduation and before attending Harvard Business School, where he spent a summer working for a venture-capital incubator, an experience, he said, that taught him that early-stage companies were not his forte.

Coming out of HBS in 2010, Maswoswe was Carlyle’s first Toigo Private Equity MBA Fellow, a yearlong position that included rotations in the buyout group, a portfolio company and a limited partner, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Now Maswoswe is focused on investing Carlyle's seventh flagship private-equity fund in industrials and transportation. His first major deal was the $4.9 billion acquisition of DuPont Performance Coatings in 2013, which was renamed Axalta Coating Systems and taken public the following year.

After four and a half years at Goldman Sachs, Jackie Klaber was looking for something more entrepreneurial when she turned a Yale Law School connection into a new job. Klaber joined Rockefeller Capital Management in March as head of opportunistic investing, as the firm relaunched under a new chief executive officer, former Morgan Stanley wealth head Greg Fleming, who is also a Yale alumnus.

Klaber focuses on alternatives, a broad remit for the US that has her scouting opportunistic investments across asset classes, from real-estate funds to female-focused venture opportunities.

Bobby Cho oversees global trading and operations for Cumberland, the Chicago-based crypto-trading unit of DRW Trading. Cho oversees the vast trading resources that make Cumberland one of the largest crypto trading desks in the world, transacting in up to 35 different crypto assets and operating 24/7 around the world.

Before Cumberland, Cho was director of trading at itBit Trust Co., where he was in charge of their crypto asset trading and custody business. Before his role at itBit, Bobby was vice president of trading and a municipal securities principal at the Digital Currency Group (formerly SecondMarket), where he helped create one of the first cryptocurrency broker-dealers, Genesis Global Trading. Cho attended Villanova University and like to explore new Korean BBQ spots in his free time.

Finance was not always the plan for Anushka Sunder. In high school, she interned at the National Institute of Health and published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. But then as a Harvard undergraduate, notable professor Martin Feldstein piqued her interest in economics. She then spent her junior year internship at Goldman Sachs, returning to the firm full time to work in the financial institutions group from 2007 to 2009.

Sunder then went to San Francisco to work for TPG for two years before Harvard Business School, and after her 2013 graduation she joined Blackstone. She now focuses on investments within healthcare, consumer and retail. She's worked on six deals since she joined, including investments in cybersecurity company Optiv, JDA Software Group, ATM-maker NCR, apparel firm Outerstuff, healthcare services firm TeamHealth and autism care specialist CARD.

Sunder serves on the board of four portfolio companies and on the Blackstone Foundation Leadership Council.

His route was nontraditional, but once Patrick McNeely found his niche handling corporate banking for massive insurance companies, he quickly made an impact.

After graduating from the University of Albany, in 2006, McNeely worked at a small broker-dealer for a spell before joining Merrill Lynch in a financial planning and analysis role in 2007. In early 2013, he made a switch into a corporate banking role at Bank of America handling insurance companies, and he wasted little time laying the groundwork to build a stable of meaningful clients, handling billions of dollars in financing deals in the process.

McNeely, who was promoted this past year, is the rare first-year director in the firm's corporate banking division with a portfolio of his own clients. He's now the lead banker with a little more than two-dozen insurances companies that have revenues ranging from $1 billion to $10 billion. McNeely also coheads the division's internship program.

Katherine Wood, a former Stanford field hockey player, decided not to follow her parents into medicine, though she came close, writing her honors thesis on developing an animal model for lymphedema. Majoring in biology and minoring in economics, she did microsurgery on mice tails to study the disease.

But Wood decided she wanted to take another path and joined Goldman Sachs in its healthcare banking group after graduation. She then landed at private-equity firm TPG focusing on pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical services, and physician-related businesses. One major deal was the carve-out of Allogene Therapeutics, a company that's developing a next-generation approach to cancer therapy, from Pfizer. Wood sits on the board of Adare Pharmaceuticals.

She recently helped launch a women's network at TPG to help colleagues learn everything from negotiating skills to how to play poker. In 2013, she received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

As a principal at hedge fund Third Point, Melvin Ike plays a leading role in the hedge fund’s most complex investments, working directly under the tutelage of billionaire founder Dan Loeb.

Ike, a first-generation American whose parents immigrated to the US from Nigeria in the late 1970s, studied bioengineering and physics at the University of Texas, and, shortly after graduation, in 2007, he joined Lazard’s restructuring practice, just in time for the flood of bankruptcies unleashed in the fallout of the financial crisis. He left for private-equity firm TPG Capital in 2010, where he spent a couple of years before pursuing a JD-MBA at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, finishing cum laude in law and first in his class at HBS.

After graduating in 2016, he started full-time at Third Point — where he’d interned the summer before — specializing in the gaming and lodging sector and flexing his law-school muscles to navigate investments with thorny legal issues. Working closely with and reporting directly to Loeb and head of equities Munib Islam, Ike has deployed billions of the firm’s $18 billion in assets under management to investments in companies like Private Bancorp, mall-company Macerich, Time Warner, and Dell Technologies.

Steve Kurz has already dabbled in trading, entrepreneurship, and asset management — and he's not done yet.

At Cornell, Kurz interned with Lehman Brothers and started there on the rates desk after graduation. A few days before the investment bank declared bankruptcy, Kurz interviewed at investment firm Fortress Investment Group. He joined later in 2008. Kurz spent five years at Fortress in between New York and Singapore focused on strategy and special projects, working closely with Fortress president Mike Novogratz.

Kurz then left Fortress to run business development and investor relations at a credit fund called River Birch Capital, where he helped raise more than $1 billion in capital and gained experience talking to different types of investors. Along the way, Kurz started making angel investments in startups like transportation company Boom Technology and flower-delivery company Urban Stems, which renewed his passion for entrepreneurship.

He quit River Burch to travel and move to the West Coast and started a virtual-reality company called Outer Realm.

Kurz joined Galaxy Digital Capital Management, an asset-management firm focused on the digital currency and blockchain sectors founded by his former Fortress boss, Novogratz, in December, when the firm was just launching. As head of asset management, he oversees a team of nine people and assets of $450 million.

Kurz is a mandolin player and sits on the board of Little Kids Rock, an organization that gives instruments and training to children around the US.

Anna Ashurov juggled investment banking and law school while managing a passel of children at home. Raised in a small city in Russia, Ashurov emigrated to New York City as a refugee when she was 15 with her parents and two sisters.

She finished high school early and started at Baruch College when she was just 16. After graduating with a degree in finance and investments, she began her career at JPMorgan's commercial bank, before moving to Barclays' leveraged finance group. When the US financial markets crashed in 2007, she transitioned into a role providing restructuring advice to companies.

In 2012 she moved to Goldman, where she works in the bank-debt portfolio group within the investment bank. She manages a portfolio of loans in leveraged finance and advises clients on all aspects of corporate finance. Last year, she worked as chief of staff for Goldman's financing division, where she led aspects of business management, including strategy, marketing, technology, and talent development.

Ashurov serves on the board of Brooklyn Law School, where she graduated as a part-time student while working full time at Goldman. Ashurov cofounded a nonprofit called Diversity in Blockchain aimed at driving inclusion in the blockchain industry.

Tian Zeng parlayed a passion for poker into a trading career.

The Beijing-born Zeng began playing cards while pursuing a finance and economics major at the University of Virginia. After making some money, he took his winnings and used them to begin trading stocks in 2008, around the time of the financial crisis.

Zeng interviewed for his first Wall Street internship during the depths of the crisis, and while attending "super day" in early 2009 he saw traders getting fired on the trading floors he visited. He was selected by Citi and then later joined full time, trading distressed mortgage securities on what was then one of the most profitable desks at the bank.

In 2011, he moved into trading credit default swaps. After several years there, he moved on to Citadel Securities to help the firm build out its swaps business. Under Zeng, Citadel became one of the top market-makers for swaps by volume. After a year there, Zeng left for Deutsche Bank, where he's now a senior credit trader, reporting to the German lender's head of credit trading, Paul Huchro, as part of a three-person team.

Zeng likes to do Muay Thai kickboxing, and he's traveled to Thailand the last three years to train.

Abigail Geller moved from Goldman Sachs to BlackRock's alpha strategies group in 2008, just weeks before the Lehman bankruptcy. In the decade since, she moved up from analyst to managing director.

As the cohead of BlackRock’s global hedge-funds division, she works directly with many North American investors, drives new fund launches, and recently hosted the firm’s first systematic hedge-fund investor day.

Geller, who graduated from Duke University magna cum laude with a public-policy degree, pivoted to finance in college after trying out journalism. Outside of work, she has long been active with the UJA-Federation of New York in multiple leadership roles and remains active in alumni relations for Duke and Horace Mann, a private school in the Bronx.

Citigroup poached Sam Berberian this summer to run junk-bond trading and help revitalize its credit-trading division. He's a coveted trader whom Goldman Sachs reportedly tried unsuccessfully to hold on to.

Berberian started out in credit trading at Goldman Sachs straight away after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2007. Three years in, at age 24, he already had his own book on the high-yield credit desk and was quickly trading billions in bonds and credit-default swaps for technology, media, and telecom companies. Known as a perennial top producer in junk-bond trading across Wall Street, he was promoted to managing director in 2015 and coheaded the high-yield credit trading desk before decamping for Citigroup.

When he wasn't working on his degrees in mechanical engineering and finance at MIT, Berberian ran cross country and track and field. He's continued to run since arriving on Wall Street, completing several New York City Marathons.

Earlier this year, Ben Axelrod was among just a handful of bankers Moelis & Co. promoted to managing director — and one of the youngest to earn the distinction in the investment bank’s nearly 12-year history.

How’d he get there? The Brooklyn native joined Moelis, in 2012, as an M&A generalist after six years in investment banking at UBS. Axelrod developed a knack for deals in medical technology, pharmaceuticals, and biotech, helping the firm turn a void in healthcare coverage into a formidable industry practice.

Among the deals he’s helped cross the finish line: the $13 billion merger of dental-product giants Dentsply and Sirona, in 2015, and Allergan's $2.5 billion buyout of fat-freezing biopharma firm Zeltiq, in 2017.

An avid musician and audiophile, Axelrod performs on the clarinet and sits on the board of the World Civic Orchestra in his spare time.

Citadel Securities poached star trader Dan Gottlander from Citigroup last year to expand the firm's derivatives offering beyond generic swaps and into more complex, custom-built territory.

Born and raised in Sweden, Gottlander graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 and cut his teeth trading interest-rate swaps at Citi. He was a lead trader on a team that pulled in a mammoth $240 million in 2016, and he was up for promotion when Citadel came calling a year later.

Now he's building tailor-made swaps products and rolling them out to the market maker's nearly 1,000 institutional clients. His efforts are partially responsible for Citadel Securities having its largest-ever day in swaps transactions in May when Italian bonds went haywire and rattled the markets.

For Ali Hassan, no wasn't an option.

Hassan, the CEO and cofounder of Crescent Crypto Asset Management, so badly wanted to work at Goldman Sachs after college that he applied nine times. He even created fake e-mail addresses because there was a limit to how many applications a candidate could submit.

His dream came true after graduating from St. Peters University in New Jersey where he was captain of their NCAA Division 1 swim team. Hassan joined Goldman's private-wealth management unit, where as a junior analyst he helped more senior wealth advisers. He dabbled in trading bitcoin in his spare time beginning in 2013, as Goldman had rules around trading single stocks but not digital assets.

He left in 2016 and hopped to investment shop Fairview Capital, where he wrote a paper about the rise of blockchain. The paper and his work on the buy side solidified his enthusiasm for crypto so he teamed up with former Goldman colleagues, Christopher Matta and Michael Kazley, to launch Crescent, one of the first funds to offer passive exposure to bitcoin for wealthy investors. Crescent doesn't disclose its assets under management, but in August, the firm raised Series A funding from crypto hedge fund FBG Capital.

Hassan plays chess most days and enjoys swimming and Ultimate frisbee.

Growing up in Cape Cod, Megan Starr was worlds away from high finance and Wall Street. Starr, the daughter of two public-school teachers, says her family grew their own food and chopped wood to heat their house.

Starr went on to Harvard to study environmental science and public policy, with a focus on climate-change research. After graduating, she became chief of staff at the JRB Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on environmental issues. She began exploring how capital markets could help drive a transition to the lower carbon economy and quickly realized she needed a grounding in finance.

She went to business school at Stanford and got connected to Hugh Lawson, a partner in Goldman Sachs's investment-management division, who was beginning to think about the socially responsible investment space. Starr interned for Lawson over the summer and helped formulate a business plan for how Goldman could get in on the emerging trend.

She was so successful that Goldman asked her to ditch her MBA and work for the bank full-time. Starr stuck with her education, finishing at Stanford while working part time for Goldman as the firm launched its ESG business. She was instrumental in Goldman's acquisition of Imprint Capital, a small firm focused on impact investing, which gave Goldman a foothold. The business started with $550 million in assets just several years ago and is now north of $15 billion. Starr now works with Lawson on a six-person strategy team.

Jeffrey Trongone is a stand-out dealmaker at Financial Technology Partners, one of the top investment banks for the burgeoning fintech space.

After graduating from Villanova, in 2006, Trongone worked at Bear Stearns in its powerhouse prime brokerage division, surviving the bank’s demise and eventual sale to JPMorgan Chase, in 2008. But a couple of years later he decided to ditch big-bank culture, and after a brief dalliance with equity research, he joined technology investment banking boutique Marlin & Associates, where he was quickly promoted and rose to the level of principal before he was poached by rival FT Partners in early 2017.

As a VP at FT Partners, Trongone handles a variety of strategic advisory mandates — public and private fundraising as well as M&A — for top fintech clients, with a specialty in payments as well as cross-board deals. He’s part of a team that has handled transactions like Trust Company of America’s $275 million sale to E-Trade in in 2017 and European digital wealth manager Moneyfarm’s more than $50 million Series B funding round from Allianz Asset Management in May, among others.

Not knowing if she would pursue engineering or business, Hommes graduated with dual degrees from Wharton and the school of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She interned at Credit Suisse's Los Angeles office after her junior year, then joined UBS’s power and utility group for her first banking job out of school. After three years there, she spent 14 months at energy-focused private-equity firm First Reserve.

She left First Reserve, in 2011, as private-equity firm Apollo Global Management started raising its first energy fund and building out its team. Working in natural resources, Hommes focuses on investing capital both from Apollo’s ninth flagship fund and a dedicated sector vehicle.

Outside of work, she plays volleyball and enjoys traveling.

Matt Rosenberg, 32, is the head of municipal high-yield and taxable municipal trading at Wells Fargo. He joined the firm in 2016 after eight years at Goldman Sachs to create a high-yield municipal trading desk and was subsequently promoted to become one of the youngest managing directors at Wells. He leads a team of four other traders and works with analysts to trade and make markets in high yield and taxable muni bonds.

Rosenberg has been recognized for a number of unique transactions. These include reeducating the markets on opportunities in overlooked sectors like auction-rate securities and City of Detroit bonds. He has consistently been ranked one of the most helpful traders in municipals, according to Greenwich Associates, and grabbed the third spot in the overall ranking for 2018.

Rosenberg graduated from the University of Miami in 2008, having majored in finance and accounting. Outside of work, he likes to hiking and traveling and is active in fostering dogs.

When Kim Stolz was named head of prime brokerage sales in the Americas at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, it was merely the latest accomplishment in a rapid ascent at the bank.

Though her dad had always pushed her toward Wall Street, Stolz had little interest in finance when she was at Wesleyan University, nor immediately after graduating in 2005. Instead, for several years she worked as a fashion model with Ford Models, a writer at The Huffington Post, and a news anchor with MTV. (She later wrote a book.)

But she grew tired of pop culture and gossip, and in 2010, at age 26, she showed up at BTIG founder Steve Starker's doorstep and persuaded him to give her a chance at a job. Tireless hours of cold-calling and hawking equity derivatives morphed into a steady stable of clients, which after two years Stolz parlayed into a job at Citi as a VP on the derivatives sales desk.

In 2014, after growing the business at Citi, she jumped to Bank of America and quickly ascended the ranks. A perennial top producer on the equity derivatives sales desk, Stolz was promoted to managing director after three years and given the job of running equity derivative hedge fund sales for all of Europe out of the London office. A little over a year later, she was brought back to New York run a team of roughly 15 handling sales to hedge fund clients in the US.