Goldman Sachs opened the gates to its upper ranks on Thursday, naming 638 new managing directors in one of Wall Street’s most anticipated promotion rounds.
The number represents a 5% increase from the firm’s 2023 class of 608. Among the hundreds of new MDs, one name stood out, Paulo Costa.
The 29-year-old has now become the youngest managing director in the organisation. He is an executive director overseeing dividend trading across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Costa’s promotion comes on the heels of a strong run for Goldman’s equities division, where third-quarter revenues climbed 7% compared to the same period a year earlier.
The bank noted that higher net revenues in financing, an area adjacent to Costa’s work, as a key driver for this growth, as reported by Business Insider.
Who is Paulo Costa?
Costa is based in London and leads dividend trading in the bank’s synthetic products group for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.
His role involves managing dividend components of financial contracts used by big investors, like hedge funds, to make bets on stocks without owning them directly.
Costa’s team manages the dividend component of those deals, ensuring that when companies pay shareholders, those payouts are accurately reflected in the value and cash flows of the trades.
Born and raised in Portugal in a family of doctors, Costa originally considered a career in medicine but developed a strong interest in financial markets during the European sovereign debt crisis.
“When I was 11 or 12 years old, we went through the European sovereign crisis,” he said. “I became very interested in how the financial markets were crashing at home. I started to read up about it and started to do very small trades when I was that age,” he told Business Insider.
Costa graduated from the University of Warwick with a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting and Finance. He joined Goldman Sachs as a summer analyst in 2016 and has risen rapidly through the ranks, becoming known for his expertise in equities and dividend trading.
As he assumes a leadership position with new responsibilities and expectations, Costa is not anxious about bearing those duties at age 29.
“No, I don’t think I necessarily have to impose myself now as a leader more than I was a week ago,” he said. “I was already beyond proud of working here. I never imagined that, when I was 29, I would be at this stage of my career,” he told Business insider .