The 2016 Hedge Fund Rising Stars: Jessye Ball

Senior investment officer Ball scouts top talent for Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management.

June 21, 2016

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< The 2016 Hedge Fund Rising Stars

Jessye Ball
Millennium Management

People are key to the success of Millennium Management, the multistrategy hedge fund firm founded by Israel (Izzy) Englander. The $33.2 billion outfit has one of the best track records in the industry: Since inception in 1989, its flagship Millennium Management fund has returned an annualized 14.02 percent. Jessye Ball, 36, a senior investment officer at the New York–based firm, is always on the lookout to hire portfolio managers with new ideas for its platform-based strategy, which allocates capital to more than 200 trading teams. Ball herself was recruited to Millennium in 2012 from financial services firm Rockefeller & Co., where she racked up nearly a decade’s worth of experience in several roles after a two-year stint as an analyst at Goldman Sachs Group.

The Worcester, Massachusetts, native, who studied dance as a child, earned a BA in political science with a minor in economics from Boston College. Her first job at New York–based Rockefeller in 2005 was with its wealth services division as a client service specialist. Ball quickly grew into a portfolio-facing role before moving to the investment division, where she worked as an equity analyst for two years. While at Rockefeller she also passed her Chartered Financial Analyst exam and decided to further her education, enrolling in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s executive MBA program in 2009. At the time, the firm didn’t have a dedicated hedge fund team; Ball, who graduated from Wharton in 2011, helped to build its hedge fund effort while spending three-day weekends studying in Philadelphia. She assisted in creating and managing two fund of hedge funds as well as proposing allocations and selecting managers — an experience that is proving invaluable for her current role at Millennium.

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Hedge Fund Rising Stars of 2016