American Consequences - March 2020

Enrique excelled in school, choosing the “fight” instead of “flight” response... He was the student body president and salutatorian his senior year. He founded the Phoenix chapter of Teen Age Republicans. He recalls winning a stock-picking contest in his Economics class when he was 16. “The contest had a loophole that no one understood... Stock purchases were done using Wednesday’s closing price. So I would either find companies that were involved in a merger after the close Wednesday, or reported great news after the close that Wednesday, or IPOs that were pricing Thursday morning. The Econ teacher didn’t know all that much about stocks, and every week I won by a landslide...” A big part of Enrique’s motivation to excel in school and ultimately in his career was his tough home life: “Being poor sucks. Being on food stamps sucks. So I came up with a plan to not be poor.” He settled on “Wall Street as a place that seems to make people rich.” He got accepted to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the top business school in the entire country. As Enrique puts it, Wharton “produces the best of the best professional athletes on Wall Street.” “There was a free Bloomberg machine and about 20 of us that used to linger around it... I didn’t have any money of course... I didn’t own any fucking stocks. But we’d just sit around and bullshit about stocks. By the way, those 20 guys have now probably managed like $100 billion through the years.”

“MEXICAN KIDS FROM PHOENIX DON’T HAVE A LOT OF CONNECTIONS TO GET WALL STREET JOBS...”

Enrique pictured shirtless with fellow Penn students during graduation week in 1994.

He stayed focused and excelled in college too, graduating top of his class with a triple- finance major. After graduation, Sponsors for Education, a group that pairs minorities with Wall Street internships and jobs, placed Enrique at Lehman Brothers in the fixed- income division. (“A great program because guess what, Mexican kids from Phoenix don’t have a lot of connections to get Wall Street jobs...”) He’d had a taste of the Wall Street life, and he liked it... and wanted more. After Lehman, he moved into hedge-fund investing and portfolio management, eventually launching his own successful hedge funds. His binary math-orientated mind was a perfect fit for a money manager and stock picker...

American Consequences

33

Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker