As a child of immigrants and a first-generation college graduate from the Bronx, Leon Cooperman made a fortune building Goldman Sachs’ asset management division and compounded it in 27 years running his hedge fund Omega Advisors. He joined Goldman as an analyst the day after graduating from Columbia’s business school in 1967, rising to become a general partner at the firm and chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Cooperman left to launch his hedge fund in 1991, which returned 12.5% annually betting on undervalued stocks, outperforming the S&P 500 Index by three percentage points, before he converted it to a family office in 2018. Assets under management peaked at more than $10 billion but dwindled when the SEC levied insider trading charges against him in 2016 related to trades in a small energy company called Atlas Pipeline Partners. Cooperman eventually paid just $4.9 million to settle the case a year later, and neither admitted nor denied misconduct. Performance remained strong during the legal fight and he closed the fund at its high watermark.
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