By early Thursday afternoon, cheers celebrating Goldman Sachs’ newly promoted managing directors had been mounting for hours throughout the firm’s London office.
Paulo Costa heard the trader across from him — whose last name starts with an X — take the call he had been hoping for. He presumed the calls would be rolled out in alphabetical order, and thought, “Oh, hang on, this is starting to feel a little strange,” he told Business Insider.
At last, the call came: he’d been named managing director — and, at 29, the youngest in this year’s class.
Costa — an executive director overseeing dividend trading across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa — was among the 638 employees in this year’s Goldman MD class. He said that it marked the culmination of a remarkable year, personally and professionally.
His 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 cited higher net revenues in financing, an area adjacent to Costa’s work, as a key driver.
Seated a few rows away from Costa when the call came was his wife, who is a prime broker at Goldman. The two met at the firm in 2018 and married this year.
“She was definitely the first person that I spoke to,” once he’d hung up the phone, he said.
The road to managing director
Costa runs dividend trading within the bank’s equities division, helping big investors like hedge funds make bets on stocks without actually buying them, using financial contracts that move with share prices. His 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.
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He has weathered a few volatile markets, from the pandemic to this year’s market sell-off in the spring. Past experiences, he said, made him “more aware” of how to approach choppy markets.
“When you really learn about the markets and the inner plumbing of things, is when things get messy,” he said, recalling how unusual trading conditions during the COVID pandemic shaped his approach.
Born and raised in Portugal in a family of doctors, Costa said his parents hoped he’d follow in their footsteps and pursue a career in medicine. But the MD title he clinched this week has proven just as satisfying. Choosing finance over medicine came as “a bit of a shock,” he said, “but I think they’re happy I did it.”
“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.”
Costa attended the University of Warwick, where he served as the equities chief investment officer for the Warwick Investment Fund, and joined Goldman as a summer analyst in the securities division in 2016.
He advised those who might want to follow his path should find what interests them. “You’re only ever going to be very good if you can work hard at something for a very long time, perfecting your craft,” he said.
Inside the celebration
By the time the announcement became official on Thursday, Goldman’s London trading floor was already buzzing. Some of the regional leaders, including members of the bank’s European Management Committee, convened a Champagne toast for new MDs on the office’s eighth floor, followed by a larger-scale gathering of about 150 people at a drinks venue nearby.
Some of Costa’s former colleagues and mentors appeared as well — including Lorenzo Longo, a former Goldman colleague and mentor who helped guide Costa early in his career. “He was almost as excited for my phone call as my wife,” Costa said with a laugh.
But now he’s stepping into the role they once held — a leadership position which will bring new responsibilities and expectations. Was he anxious about bearing those new duties at age 29? No, he said: “I don’t think I necessarily have to impose myself now as a leader more than I was a week ago.”
But he didn’t deny the “gravitas” he said it comes with. “It certainly helps being a young person to get the title,” he conceded, reflecting on the 21-year-old version of himself that was starting his career at the bank.
“I was already beyond proud of working here” at the time, he said. “I never imagined that, when I was 29, I would be at this stage of my career.”
