Successful young traders and bankers on Wall street

The Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list is made up of men and women who are already making their mark at leading investment banks, hedge funds and other financial firms. Each one has attained tremendous responsibility at a young age and has a compelling story to tell.

At the age of 29, for example, Jennifer Fan is already a Wall Street veteran. Now running her own $650 million hedge fund, Arbalet Capital, Fan has traded oil and gas in the aftermath of the collapse of Enron, the disruption of hurricane Katrina, the boom and bust of natural gas prices, and the shift to electronic trading. Fan arrived in Manhattan from Pittsburgh at the age of 16 to attend New York University. Within three years she had pocketed two degrees in finance and statistics. While interning at Bank of America as a teenager, Fan gravitated to commodities trading and at Morgan Stanley she learned to make bets on refined petroleum products like diesel and jet fuel.

Tracy Britt, 28, grew up on a farm in Kansas and struck up a relationship with Warren Buffett while at Harvard, contacting him out of the blue to see if he would meet with a non-profit group she co-founded focusing on investment education for undergraduate women.  A few years later Britt moved to Omaha to become Buffett’s financial assistant at Berkshire Hathaway—and since then Britt has become chairman of Berkshire-owned companies Benjamin Moore and Larson-Juhl.

Jiayi Chen first met Steve Kuhn while taking Kuhn’s university class in Beijing. Kuhn recruited Jiayi to join him at Goldman Sachs and, later, to follow him to Pine River Capital Management, a $10.7 billion hedge fund firm where Kuhn is head of fixed income trading. Now 29, Jiayi is a Pine River partner and co-portfolio manager of the $1 billion Pine River Liquid Mortgage Fund, one of the best-performing hedge funds of 2012.

The youngest financial up and comer on this year’s list is Sheel Tyle, who at age 21 is already working at his second venture capital firm, leaving Bessemer Ventures to join New Enterprise Associates after graduating from Stanford at the age of 19. Other venture capitalists on the list include John Locke, a vice president at Accel Partners, and Ray Bradford, an investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
No firm has more people on this year’s 30 Under 30 Finance list than Goldman Sachs.

The Wall Street firm’s rising young talent includes Lucy Baldwin, who at 28 is already a managing director, heading Goldman’s European retail and consumer equity research team, and is co-business leader of the equity research consumer business unit in Europe. Meanwhile, Andrew Silverman, 27, has emerged as a star credit derivatives and bond trader, working on Goldman’s distressed trading desk.

The finance business, of course, is a global industry. This year’s 30 Under 30 Finance list includes people working in London, like Jonathan Fayman, who co-runs a $1.3 billion macro hedge fund at BlueBay Asset Management and is originally from South Africa, and Manuel Stotz, who runs a $1.5 billion portfolio at THS Partners and is from Germany. Stefan Renold works for the LMR Partners hedge fund he co-founded in Hong Kong.

Who made the best deal of the bunch in 2012? Probably Joshua Kushner, whose $200 million private equity firm cashed in big on its investment in Instagram within hours, when it was sold to Facebook.