Feed: Savvy Financiers - AggScore: 47.6

Jamie Dimon - CEO of JPMorgan Chase Co.

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Jamie Dimon is the current CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Born in New York City, the son of a stockbroker, He majored in psychology and economics at Tufts University, before earning an M.B.A. at Harvard University.

Dimon became a protégé of Citigroup's Sanford “Sandy” Weill. Their relationship started when Dimon, at his teens, interned at brokerage house Shearson which Weill was the Chairman. Dimon remained close to Weill throughout the years via family connections. In 1998 Dimon and Weill were able to form the largest financial services conglomerate the world had ever seen, Citigroup.

After his relationship with Weill soured, Dimon reinvented himself in Chicago through the undergoing situation of BankOne’s financial distress. Dimon joined BankOne as its CEO in March 2000, several corporate issues being solved i.e. slashing expenses, reorganizing management, recruiting talent from his former employers, and writing off bad loans by the billions, did the immense improvement on BankOne turned out the huge pay-off later. In June, BankOne reported more than dollarsignr708 million in its quarter profit, compared to its dollarsignr1 billion in losses a year ago.

Dimon became President of JPMorganChase in mid-2004 when it purchased BankOne. JPMorganChase has now become the leading U.S. bank in terms of domestic assets, market capitalization value, and publicly traded stock value. JPMorganChase is also the #1 credit card provider in the United States.

In March 2008, he was a board member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and made decisions in connection with the dollarsignr55 billion loan to JPMorganChase to bail out Bear Stearns. Robert Bruner, author of The Panic of 1907, says J. Pierpont Morgan saved Wall Street's banks during a crisis similar to the one Dimon addressed a century later.

Edward Lampert - ESL Investments

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Edward Lampert started his own fund management by establishing ESL Investments in 1988 after earning an economics degree with at Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University and then cutting his teeth under Robert Rubin at the risk arbitrage department at Goldman Sachs when he decided to go out on his own, Rubin warned it was a bad career decision.

The name ESL derives from Lampert's initials and with financial support from Richard Rainwater, whom he had met on Nantucket Island, who gave him dollarsignr28 million in seed money and introduced him to clients, such as David Geffen. In 2003, he was kidnapped from the parking lot of his office, but Lampert convinced his captors to let him go after two days.

ESL Investments has returned an average of 29 percent a year since its inception, according to a BusinessWeek report, generally by building substantial positions in a few highly researched holdings. Besides stakes in Kmart and Sears, Lampert's fund also owns large positions in car dealer AutoNation and auto-parts retailer AutoZone.

That concentrated approach has paid off handsomely for Lampert, who in 2003 took home a dollarsignr420 million pay package, the fourth-biggest in the hedge fund industry, according to Reuters.

With his savvy bets on distressed or underperforming assets, he has built a reputation as a one of Wall Street's most successful and renowned hedge fund managers. His earnings in 2004 were estimated to be dollarsignr1.02 billion USD; making Lampert the first Wall Street financial manager to exceed an income of dollarsignr1 billion in a single year.

Bruce Kover - Caxton Fund

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Bruce Kover worked his title as the left-winger of the extraordinare investor, George Soros. However, Kover did not like the business interviews very much.

Kovner graduated his BA in political science and economics from Harvard in 1966, also taught political science at Harvard and University of Pennsylvania. Somehow, he dropped out of the Kennedy School before he completed his Ph.D.

And that the starting point for his financier’s career in trading the commodities, at the office of Michael Marcus and also co-worked with Jack Schwager at Commodities Corp.

Kovner set up his own hedge fund, Caxton, in 1983. Some reports said Caxton had returned 28% annually and he made some USdollarsignr500 million for his own fortune in the year 2001. He made his fundamental decisions for currency and futures trading on the judgments based on his team’s analysis of the impact of the worldwide political and economic events.

While in a bear market, his investment tactics will depend on sharp countertrend rallies to sell, this is for the purpose of placing [your] stops at a point that will reasonably indicate the trade is wrong, not at a point determined primarily by the maximum dollar amount you are willing to lose. Staying rational and disciplined under pressure is the key for his success in this hedge fund business.

James Harris Simons - Renaissance Technologies

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James (Jim) Simons, is the grandson of a Jewish entrepreneur who ran a shoe factory business in Massachusetts. He graduated a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958, and received his PhD in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 at the age of 23 years.

During 1964-1968, Simons worked as a research staff at the Communications Research Division of Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). He also took the title as a professor in mathematics at MIT and Harvard University. In 1968 he was appointed Chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Stony Brook University.

Simons' most influential research onto the wide interest and application of many scientists as well as physicists involved the discovery and application of certain geometric measurements, which was resulted in the Chern-Simons invariants, or Chern-Simons theory. In 1974, his theory was published in Characteristic Forms and Geometric Invariants, co-authored with the differential geometer Shiing-Shen Chern. The theory is still currently used in theoretical physics, particularly string theory.

In 1978, he left his academic career in order to establish and manage an investment fund that traded in commodities and financial instruments on his cutting-edge, well-discrete math-whiz calculation methods which is now still a secrecy in this hedge fund industry.