Fund Managers At Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan Future of Finance Conference
Brett Hickey, CEO of Star Mountain Capital
Neal Berger, Founder & CIO Eagle’s View Capital Management
Andrea Himmel, CIO Himmel + Meringoff
Perry Boyle, Fmr Senior Partner, Point72
Gordon Ritter, Quant of the Year 2019, Adjunct Professor, Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan
Jenny Friedman, Managing Partner, Four Acres
Kevin Mahn, President & CIO of Hennion & Walsh Asset Management
Richard Craib, Founder & CEO Numerai
Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan 2022 Future of Finance Conference
Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Brett A. Hickey CEO Star Mountain Capital
Brett Hickey has over 20 years of private investing and investment banking experience with over 15 years spent directly in the U.S. lower middle-market. He has completed over 135 private equity, private credit and secondary fund investments.
Mr. Hickey is the Founder & CEO of Star Mountain Capital, LLC, a multi-billion dollar specialized private investment firm. Star Mountain employs a data-driven approach to provide value-added debt and equity capital to established small and medium-sized private companies leveraging its scale-driven resources and longstanding relationships. Star Mountain also has a secondary fund investment business. Providing early liquidity for investors in lower middle-market private credit and private equity funds.
Driven by culture and stakeholder alignment, Star Mountain has been recognized as one of the Best Places to Work by Crain’s and Pensions & Investments in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Previously, Mr. Hickey worked as an Investment Banker at Citigroup Global Markets in New York City (formerly known as Salomon Smith Barney) where he worked with global investment managers and financial institutions, helping them evaluate strategic and portfolio investments. Moreover, in that role he worked on over $24 billion in completed debt and equity transactions as well as mergers and acquisitions.
He graduated with Distinction from McGill University in Montreal, Canada with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Finance and Accounting. Furthermore, he is an alumnus of Harvard Business School’s Owner, President / Manager executive training and management program.
He has completed numerous other business programs including Building Your Business. Through Transformational Leadership & Innovation at the Innovatrium on the University of Michigan’s campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Furthermore, is a frequent guest lecturer on industry panels and at academic institutions.
In addition, he sits on a number of boards, including the global board of Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs and the YMCA of Greenwich. Prior positions include the Board of Governors of the Small Business Investor Alliance and Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) NYC Chapter. He has been a member of YPO for over 12 years. He is also the Founder & Chairman of the Star Mountain Charitable Foundation, a 501(c)(3) focused on job creation (including for veterans, women and athletes), economic development and health & wellness. Lastly, Mr. Hickey is a former Canadian national gold medalist and North American medalist in speed skating.
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Neal Berger Founder & CIO Eagle’s View Capital Management, LLC : Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile
Neal Berger is a veteran Wall Street Trader/Investor of over 30 years. He spent a dozen years as a proprietary global macro trader. Most notably with Millennium Partners hedge fund on two separate occasions. Neal was also a proprietary trader at Fuji Bank as well as Chase Manhattan Bank where he was a Senior Vice President.
Neal has been an investor in hedge funds for more than 25 years on behalf of high-net worth individuals, family offices, and select institutions. Eagle’s View Capital Management, LLC is the Investment Manager to five Multi-Manager products and also runs an active advisory business creating customized portfolios of hedge funds for high-net worth individuals and institutions.
Neal is widely known for investing in ‘niche-oriented’, under the radar, non-mainstream strategies such as: Power Trading. Algorithmic Pattern Recognition. Shipping Derivatives. Volatility Arbitrage. And various other strategies that seek to capitalize upon structural inefficiencies in the market.
Lastly, Neal graduated from The State University of New York at Albany in 1990 with a B.A. in Economics.
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Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Andrea Himmel Chief Investment Officer Himmel + Meringoff
• In 2018, Andrea joined the firm that her mother co founded in 1979, Himmel & Meringoff Properties (“HMP”), a long-term oriented, vertically-integrated real estate firm that owns one of the largest privately-held portfolios of office buildings in Manhattan and industrial warehouses in the boroughs of NYC.
• HMP is committed to the long-term ownership and hands-on operation of office buildings in Manhattan and industrial warehouses in the boroughs.
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• As Chief Investment Officer + Principal, Andrea runs acquisitions (including deal sourcing/canvassing, performance of due diligence, in-depth valuation) and growth for the company across many asset types, throughout the capital stack, and across verticals.
• She is leading the redevelopment of HMP’s 8.5-acre industrial site in Parkchester through a local rezoning that would generate 2 million sq. ft. of affordable housing.
• Moreover, Andrea is recognized as a thought leader in the New York real estate community, speaking regularly on panels and at conferences for organizations including NYU, PWC, The Commercial Observer, CUNY TV, REFI, Columbia Business School, NYU Shack Real Estate Institute, The UJA, The Real Deal, The Stoler Report, The Opal Group, and Bisnow. She also founded and moderates a Commercial Real Estate Investing club on social audio app Clubhouse that has over 5,000 members.
BACKGROUND
• Andrea grew up in NYC and attended Horace Mann from ages 3-18, graduating within the top 5% of her class.
• A nationally-top-ranked junior competitive tennis player, she decided to attend The University of Pennsylvania instead of pursuing a professional tennis career.
• Andrea studied real estate within the Joseph Wharton Scholars program, Wharton’s undergraduate honors program for the top 5% of the student body. She served on WAB, the Wharton Advisory Board, a small group of students selected by Wharton’s administration to advise on co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.
2008-2016
• Andrea worked for 2 years out of college at Brookfield Properties in leasing and development.
• From 2009-2016, she was part of the founding team and 1 of 7 investment professionals who worked for Lew Sanders at long-only value-oriented hedge fund Sanders Capital, which has $60 billion of AUM. Lew was the co-founder of Sanford Bernstein in 1968 and CEO of Alliance Bernstein (asset manager with $1 trillion of AUM under Lew’s leadership) through 2008. Andrea was responsible for managing 10% of the AUM within the oil and gas energy sector.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN OIL AND GAS
• In 2016, Andrea saw an opportunity for arbitrage in the face of the plummeting oil price to buy small, private energy royalty assets, and launched an oil-focused private equity company in Texas, Tierra Resource Partners.
• Two years later, she launched a successor fund to invest in oil and gas royalties called Revere Resources. She hired a team of former Bain and Apollo energy executives, raised $6 million to buy oil royalties in Southwest Texas, and sold the fund one year later for $18 million.
• Off the success of Fund I’s 3x multiple, Andrea built Revere into a 25-person company based in Houston, raising $300 million from hedge fund Elliott Management.
• In 2018, she resigned from daily operations to re-enter real estate; Andrea continues to serve as an advisor to, owner of, and investor in Revere Resources Funds II and III.
PHILANTHROPY
• Andrea serves on the Board of Directors of The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, advocating for the success of Manhattan’s small businesses, which comprise 99% of companies in NYC.
• Andrea serves on the Board of the Diversity Committee for the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry.
• In addition, Andrea serves on the Board of Directors of Habitat for Humanity New York City, marrying her passion for real estate with Habitat’s mission of building affordable, safe, equitable housing for all. She also serves as the Co-Chair of the Real Estate Council for Habitat for Humanity New York City.
• She has been a Big Sister through non-profit Big Brothers Big Sistersfor over seventeen years to her “little” Samantha Flamer.
• She is active with several other non-profits including ChildFund, in which she sponsors eleven adolescent women in Sierra Leone and Uganda, and The Gay Center.
OTHER
• Passions: philanthropy, chess, theater, mindfulness, meditation, Central Park, the outdoors, her two dogs, yoga, tennis, and triathlons (she has competed in several, including a half-Ironman and a full Ironman)
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Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Perry Boyle
Perry helped lead Point72’s launch as a registered investment advisor, raising over $6.8bn in external capital. He originally joined S.A.C. Capital Advisors in 2004 as the firm’s first Director of Research. In January 2013 he became Head of Equities and, in January 2015, he became Head of Discretionary Investing at Point72. From June 2016 through December 2017 he served as the President and Chief Investment Officer of Stamford Harbor Capital, L.P., a company owned by Steven A. Cohen. He returned to Point72 in January 2018.
Moreover, in his various leadership roles at the firm, Mr. Boyle managed the Long/Short and Macro PMs. He created and led the firm’s professional development programs, including P72 Academy and the 9s Program, and helped drive the Internationalization of the firm, overseeing offices in London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore.
Prior to joining S.A.C., Mr. Boyle was a Founding Partner of Thomas Weisel Partners, and a Managing Director at Alex. Brown & Sons.
He began his career as an investment banker with Salomon Brothers Inc.
Mr. Boyle received his A.B. in Economics from Stanford University and his M.B.A. from Dartmouth College and he is pursuing a masters degree at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Furthermore, he has lectured on investing at Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, Cambridge and UNC, and delivered testimony to Congress on financial regulation.
In conclusion, Mr. Boyle is a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and a Director of The US Friends of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He was a 2018 and 2019 delegate from the IISS to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. In addition, he is a Council Member of the Hoover Institution and a Lionel Curtis member of Chatham House. Lastly, Mr. Boyle helps lead the annual Ride For Our Vets, the major source of funding for the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center.
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Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Jenny Friedman Managing Partner Four Acres Capital
Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Jenny Friedman Managing Partner Four Acres Capital
Jenny is co-founder of Four Acres Capital. She is also Managing Partner of Supernode Ventures. Prior to Supernode, Jenny worked at Eniac Ventures, where she focused primarily on seed stage investments in mobile-first technology. Jenny also spent time in an operational role at Minibar Delivery, an e-commerce startup, focusing on data analytics and business development. She worked as a financial professional at Goldman Sachs in the Investment Management Division.
Jenny was selected as “Venture Capital’s 40 Under 40 Rising Stars”in Venture Capital Journal and awarded “40 Under 40” by YJP.
In conclusion, she serves as an advisor to Mount Sinai Innovation Partners and is a member of Wharton Private Equity & Venture Capital Alumni Association. Lastly, she graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Business School. Jenny was born and raised in New York City.
Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Gordon Ritter 2019 Quant of the Year & Cornell Financial Engineering Adjunct Professor
Gordon Ritter completed his PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University in 2007. His publications while at Harvard were in quantum field theory, differential geometry, quantum computation and abstract algebra, including a well-known simplicity theorem for Kac-Moody groups and a mathematically rigorous treatment of Euclidean QFT on Riemannian manifolds. Prior to Harvard he earned his Bachelor’s degree with honors in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Dr. Ritter currently teaches at Columbia, NYU, University of Chicago and the Baruch MFE program. His academic research is on portfolio optimization and statistical machine learning; his finance publications can be found in journals including Risk, the Journal of Portfolio Management. Journal of Financial Data Science, European Journal of Operations Research, and others.
He was named Buy-Side Quant of the Year in 2019!
(Researchers awarded the same honor in other years included Marcos Lopez de Prado, Alex Lipton, and Jean-Phillipe Bouchaud). In parallel with his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Ritter works full time in the industry. In 2019 he founded Ritter Alpha LP. A registered investment adviser running systematic absolute-return trading strategies across multiple asset classes and geographies, based on cutting-edge technology and rigorous applications of statistics and the scientific method to investment problems.
Prior to founding Ritter Alpha, he built a successful trading system from scratch at GSA Capital, a firm which won the Equity Market Neutral & Quantitative Strategies category at the Eurohedge awards four times. Prior to GSA, Dr. Ritter was a Vice President of Highbridge Capital Management (HCM) and a core member of the HCM statistical arbitrage group. Moreover, a small team sharing full discretion over systematic trading models that generated billions in profit for investors and directed trillions of dollars of trades across global equities, futures and options. Several senior members of the HCM statistical arbitrage group later joined Gordon at Ritter Alpha. Lastly, in his spare time Gordon enjoys scuba diving in Hawaii. In addition, is passionate about preservation of Native Hawaiian culture and marine ecosystems.
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Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Kevin Mahn President & CIO of Hennion & Walsh Asset Management
Kevin Mahn is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Hennion & Walsh Asset Management.
Mr. Mahn is responsible for the Wealth and Asset Management products and services offered at the Firm including the SmartTrust® platform of Unit Investment Trusts (UITs). In addition, Kevin also was the Portfolio Manager of the SmartGrowth® family of Mutual Funds.
Mr. Mahn is the author of the quarterly “CEF and ETF Insights” and “Market Outlook” newsletters as well as a co-author of the book, Exchange Traded Funds: Conceptual and Practical Investment Approaches, © 2009 Riskbooks. Moreover, articles written by Mr. Mahn have been published in The Journal of Investing and The Journal of Index Investing. Mr. Mahn is a contributor to Forbes, Talk Markets and Seeking Alpha.
Prior to Hennion & Walsh, Mr. Mahn was a Senior Vice President at Lehman Brothers where he held several senior management positions, including CAO of the High-Net-Worth Product and Services group within Lehman’s Wealth and Asset Management division as well as COO of Lehman Brothers Bank. Mr. Mahn received his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Muhlenberg College and his M.B.A. in Finance from Fairleigh Dickinson University
(FDU).
Mr. Mahn has also served as an adjunct professor at FDU within the Department of Economics, Finance and International Business. Furthermore, in 2015, Mr. Mahn received the “50 Under 50” award from the Silberman College of Business at FDU. Mr. Mahn currently serves on the Board of Directors of NICSA and was formerly a Co-Chair of the NICSA UIT Industry Committee, winning the 2014 and 2016 NICSA MVP Awards for his accomplishments in that role.
Kevin also won the Rising Stars of Mutual Funds Award from Institutional Investor in 2009. Lastly Kevin appeared in/on CBS News, Fox News, CNBC, Fox Business News, Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Fortune, Forbes, New York Times, Financial Times, USA Today, Bloomberg, Reuters, Nasdaq and Yahoo! Finance.
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Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan’s 2022 Future Of Finance Conference Speaker Profile: Richard Craib Founder & CEO Numerai
Richard Craib is the Founder and CEO of Numerai, a market neutral quant hedge fund built on thousands of crowdsourced machine learning models.
Richard graduated with a degree in pure mathematics from Cornell University. Previously, he built a global equity fund powered by machine learning at $15 billion asset manager, Prudential (M&G).
In October 2015, Richard founded Numerai in San Francisco to build a new kind of hedge fund where data scientists around the world collaborate to predict equity returns using artificial intelligence.
Numerai runs a weekly data science tournament at https://numer.ai. Data scientists from around the world with varying backgrounds can download our clean, obfuscated data for free, build a model and submit to predict the stock market. Because it’s obfuscated data, you don’t have to know anything about finance to participate.
The best predictions are incorporated into a meta model which we use to create the portfolio that informs the trades of our global equity hedge fund. Learn more about the Numerai meta model https://youtu.be/dhJnt0N497c
Learn more: https://numerai.fund
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