From left to right: Bracebridge cofounder Nancy Zimmerman, D.E. Shaw managing director Anne Dinning,... [+]
Though the world of Wall Street is traditionally male-dominated at the top, four members of Forbes’ America's Richest Self-Made Women list are in finance, up from three last year. These female titans have a collective net worth of $2.2 billion, and oversee a combined $60 billion in assets. Three have built their fortunes through their own firms, and two are newcomers to the list.
The wealthiest female hedge fund founder in the U.S., Nancy Zimmerman started her Boston-based Bracebridge Capital in 1994. A Brown alumna, Zimmerman kicked off her career with options trading company O’Connor & Associates, where she traded currency options on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. She soon headed to New York for a stint at Goldman Sachs, then decided to strike out on her own.
By 1994, the talented trader had courted billionaire Tom Steyer’s Farallon Capital and Yale’s investments office -- responsible for the university’s $25.4 billion endowment -- to seed her new firm with $50 million. Today, Bracebridge manages over $10 billion in net assets, making it one of the largest hedge funds in the world headed by a woman. Zimmerman remains its majority owner, and has an estimated fortune of $800 million.
A pair of finance veterans also made their way onto the list. Anne Dinning, who has helped run quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw for nearly two decades, is a newcomer with a net worth of $600 million. A native of Seattle with a doctorate in computer science from New York University, Dinning tried out for billionaire David Shaw’s firm in 1990 almost on a whim. “Everything else I was interviewing for was to be a professor in computer science,” she told Institutional Investor’s Alpha in 2009. “I like what I saw to be the very short-term feedback loop here. You could measure very quantitatively how I could contribute to the firm...”
Now a Wall Street success story that counts billionaires Jeff Bezos, John Overdeck and David Siegel among its alumni, D.E. Shaw was then a fledgling firm with a reported 20 employees, operating out of a New York City loft with unfinished ceilings. Dinning took the job as a junior researcher and quickly rose through the ranks, heading much of the firm’s hedge fund activities by 1995. She retired and moved back to Seattle in 1999, but returned three years later as David Shaw transitioned the day to day management of his funds to an executive committee made up of longtime employees.
Since then, the firm’s assets under management have grown from under $5 billion to over $40 billion. Dinning, who served over 15 years on the executive committee, recently moved to a senior leadership position as a managing director.
Another newcomer, Victoria Zoellner, cofounded one of the country’s first independent investment managers with late husband Robert Zoellner in 1976. The couple started with $400,000 from friends, family and other associates, and wrote partnership and offering agreements in the living room of their Manhattan apartment. Originally named Whitehall Associates, the Zoellners renamed their firm Alpine Associates Management -- a lower key, less Wall Street-sounding name, says Victoria -- when they moved across the river to the ritzy New Jersey town of Alpine.
Robert Zoellner, a former managing partner at an investment firm, took charge of the stock trading, while Victoria, who had worked as a Wall Street portfolio analyst, concentrated on merger arbitrage. The firm grew by word of mouth, becoming one of the first broker dealers in the U.S. with an female owner. “We complemented each other in our strengths and in our focuses,” Victoria says. “We were very aligned in honing our business and developing synergies between the two investment disciplines.”
Today, Alpine manages $1.7 billion in net assets, and still retains its original investors from the 1970s. Robert passed away in 2014, and Victoria is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the firm; Robert’s son, Robert Zoellner Jr., now heads the fund as CEO and co-chief investment officer. She remains chairman and sole owner of the business; Forbes estimates her net worth at $500 million.
Moroccan-born Sonia Gardner, with a $320 million fortune, is also a part of a dynamic duo. The former attorney partnered with her brother Marc Lasry after graduating from law school, first working in Cowen & Co.’s bankruptcy and corporate reorganization departments, then handling distressed debt investments for Texas billionaire Robert Bass. The siblings later cofounded Amroc Investments, a boutique distressed investment brokerage firm, in 1991. Four years later, they set up asset manager Avenue Capital with $7 million from family and friends. Avenue now has over $10 billion in assets under management, and Gardner runs the global firm’s daily affairs as its president.
