Alumnus Spotlight: Josh Levine ’13

Since conducting this interview, Josh has moved to Citadel, a multi-strategy hedge fund. He is currently a Senior Associate in the firm’s event driven-focused Fundamental Strategies group.

As a college student majoring in History and minoring in Business at Brandeis University, Josh Levine, MBA ’13, considered entering the world of academia, but for the most part, had not yet zeroed in on a career of choice. Things changed when he secured a position at an equity hedge fund on Wall Street. The world of investment drew him in.

Working first as a research analyst at Riverpark Capital, a long-short equity hedge fund, and then as an investment analyst at Nine Thirty Capital Management, a multi-family office investing long-term family wealth across a number of investment strategies, including hedge funds and private equity, Josh found himself strongly absorbed by the work he did. The process of learning about companies, working with a mosaic of ideas, and making a call on what a stock would do was a rewarding experience for him. “It’s like trying to put pieces of a puzzle together,” he said. After four years, however, Josh realized that in order to stay and excel in the field, he needed to build on his base knowledge of finance, which he had not acquired in his undergraduate studies. An MBA was the answer.

In 2011, Josh stepped onto the Cornell campus. “The Cayuga Fund was absolutely one of the biggest draws to Johnson,” he explained. As a portfolio manager for the Cayuga Fund, he was able to put ideas to work in a real-life setting, which, in addition to honing his investment skills, proved to be “exciting and a lot of fun.”

After “a ton of conversations and a ton of stock pitches,” Josh finally landed a coveted job offer from J.P. Morgan a week after graduating from Johnson, and he has worked there since. Currently, he serves as Vice President in the company’s Equity Research department, working as one of the two juniors, who are incidentally both Johnson alumni, supporting the Food Producers and Retailers coverage team. He is also the lead coverage analyst for two food companies, responsible for helping draft research reports, maintaining financial models and projections, and assisting client inquiries pertaining to the food industry. Josh received Honorable Mention in the Institutional Investor survey in both 2016 and 2017.

To current MBA students interested in investment, Josh offers the following advice: network as much as possible to grow your contact base, practice your pitches – both personal and stocks, and learn more about other ways to look at the world to broaden your mind as an investor.

Josh lives in New York with his wife Alexia and daughter Arielle.