Take Control of Your Career Path, Henry Swieca ’82 Tells Students
“If you want to make it, take
your career into your own hands,” Henry Swieca ’82 told Columbia Business
School students on October 23.
Swieca, cofounder of
Highbridge Capital Management and founder and CIO of Talpion Fund Management,
shared professional and personal advice as part of the David and Lyn Silfen
Leadership Series. Swieca discussed his humble beginnings growing up in New York’s
Washington Heights neighborhood in the 1960s and ’70s., the son of immigrant
parents who were Holocaust survivors, “I learned to watch my back,” Swieca
said. “Manhattan then didn’t look like it does now.”
He saw a path to financial
security through his uncle, a dentist who also invested in the stock market.
When both Swieca’s parents died while he was in college, he turned to the
market as a way to pay not only for his own education, but for his brother’s
medical school, too. The undergrad bought 1,000 shares in Warner Communications
using nearly all the money he had at the time.
After two years, the stock
had doubled, and Swieca had been accepted into Columbia Business School on a
two-year deferment. He used that time to travel, work in Israel, and accept a
job at Merrill Lynch — a position he found by knocking on the doors of retail
banks throughout Manhattan. “I told them I was hungry and would work for very
little money,” Swieca said. “I had no connections; I had to hustle and
struggle.”
At Merrill Lynch, Swieca
learned every aspect of the brokerage business, practical experience he
combined with his studies at Columbia, where he learned about capital structure
and leverage. In 1984, he started the Dubin and Swieca Group at E. F. Hutton
with business partner Glenn Dubin; the two would pioneer the integration of
traditional securities and derivative investment strategies. In 1992, Dubin and
Swieca started Highbridge Capital Management, which they eventually sold to JP
Morgan Chase. In 2011, Swieca started Talpion Fund Management.
Acknowledging that the
finance industry has changed since he started working in the ’80s and ’90s,
Swieca advised students to broaden their job search to non-traditional firms
and smaller companies. “Checking boxes and following a set career path was
never my style, and it’s much harder to do today,” he said. “Look at your
skills and what’s ahead for the market, then match what you’re good at with the
opportunities that are out there.”
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