After working at J.P. Morgan for five years, Loganchuk founded Upgrade Capital to provide opportunities to students who have no way of proving their financial capabilities when applying for jobs. Upgrade Capital finds talented young investors, and showcases their ideas and investing skills to financial firms, regardless of university, GPA, or resume.
"The single best trader I met while I was at J.P. Morgan was fired with no severance ... and one of the worst traders I met was kept around through the entire financial crisis, and was actually given a series of promotions and wound up joining a different bank with higher pay," Loganchuk said. "That was one instance where I saw merit wasn't really recognized on the sell side."
"For these students, they have the brand that comes with
going to these universities, so they are by no means lost, they are by
no means doomed to obscurity," Loganchuk said. "But outside of these
core schools, if there's somebody at University of Missouri who is as
good as the best investor at Harvard, there's no way in heck they would
get quite the opportunities a Harvard student would get. And to me, this
is a massive source of inefficiency."
"Frankly, a lot of hedge funds I feel are not the most honest when it comes to recruiting among the student rank," he said. "For example, I definitely know stories of lots of hedge funds who will post job postings or internship postings just to collect stock write-ups. And they never say it out loud, but ... they're really just trying to get lots of free work."
