Rags to Riches

Top Wall Street traders are both rich and powerful. However, many of them didn’t start out that way. A lot of them are self-made, coming from humble beginnings and getting ahead based on hard work, talent and a little bit of luck.

Here are five traders who went from rags to riches.

Chris Gardner

Chris Gardner is perhaps one of the best-known success stories, coming from humble beginnings to end up as CEO of Gardner Rich & Co, a leading stock brokerage firm.

He started out almost destitute in San Francisco, a single father who was homeless. His one asset was his trainee job with Dean Witter Reynolds, where he was earning only $12,000 a year. He was also competing for a full-time job with the company, which he managed to secure — one of only 20 trainees who did this.

Today, Gardner is worth millions and is one of the most respected people on Wall Street. He is so well known that he was the subject of the film “Pursuit of Happyness” starring Will Smith.

Lloyd Blankfein

Today, Lloyd Blankfein is known as the hard-nosed but quoteable CEO of Goldman Sachs. However, he’s come a long way since his humble start in life.

Blankfein is the son of a receptionist and a postal worker, and grew up in the Bronx sharing a bedroom with his grandmother. During this time, he worked the concessions at Yankee Stadium and spent time as a lifeguard to get extra money.

He managed to earn a Harvard scholarship, but even then had to work in the cafeteria to keep body and soul together. After that, he attended Harvard Law School, and went on to become a practicing lawyer before switching to investment banking. The rest is history.

George Soros

Soros is known as the man who broke the Bank of England. But, he started out growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Budapest just as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.

He moved to England, where his uncle paid his tuition fees at the London School of Economics. However, he was still poor throughout his time there, working as a waiter and a porter at a railway station.

Once he graduated, he went to work for the Singer & Friedlander bank. Today, Soros is a legend with an estimated net worth of more than $24 billion. It has been argued that his growing up in the ‘school of hard knocks’ was a crucial part of him enjoying a successful financial career.

Leon Cooperman

Leon Cooperman founded Omega Advisors, and is now worth $3.7 billion US. However, like Lloyd Blankfein, he grew up in the Bronx, where his father was a plumber.

Both of his parents had immigrated to the United States, and he was the first in his family to graduate from college — leaving Columbia University with an MBA. When he got out of college, he was broke, and had student debts

and a six-month old infant to look after.

He went to work for Goldman Sachs, where he stayed for 25 years before starting up his own hedge fund.

Glenn Dubin

Glenn Dubin is the CEO and cofounder of Highbridge Capital Management, and is now worth about $2 billion. He grew up in Washington Heights, a working-class immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan. His father was a taxi driver and his mother was an administrator at a hospital.

He attended a local public school, and then gained a degree in economics from Stony Brook University.

He set up Highbridge Capital Management together with Henry Swieca, a childhood friend who he met playing in a sandbox at a local park.

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