A senior Goldman Sachs Group Inc. rates trader who shared a poignant note on confronting racism in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing is leaving the Wall Street giant.
(Bloomberg) — A senior Goldman Sachs Group Inc. rates trader who shared a poignant note on confronting racism in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing is leaving the Wall Street giant.
At 34, Fred Baba is currently one of the youngest partners at the bank, having charted a quick rise through its systematic market-making team with a focus on rates trading. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology alum’s exit comes just months after he was elevated to partner, as he fields offers from nonbank firms including Jane Street Group, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Representatives for Goldman Sachs, Jane Street and Baba declined to comment on his exit. Baba’s trading group has been driving deeper into markets that have been slower to adapt to algorithmic trading. Their coding skills help drive quantitative models that are programmed to trade macroeconomic events across stocks and bonds.
Baba was already a managing director when he wrote the email to colleagues about his experience being Black after Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, which sparked a nationwide reckoning on race. His message was widely shared within the firm before ricocheting around Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange even posted a video of Baba ringing the bell in a tribute to Floyd in June 2020.
In the months after the unrest that followed Floyd’s murder, many of the biggest firms in finance and across corporate America promised to redouble their efforts to diversify their ranks and help close the racial inequality gap.
“The only way that we can hit our bottom line and create revenue streams that are going to be impactful to our shareholders is to have diversity of background across every level of the firm,” Goldman’s chief diversity officer, Megan Hogan, said last week in a Bloomberg Television interview.
Read More: A Goldman Executive’s Advice to White Colleagues: Frederick Baba
Baba emigrated with his family to New Orleans from Nigeria in 1990, before moving to Ohio. After joining MIT, the computer-science major got his first brush with finance through internships at UBS Group AG and Allston Trading.
He got his first full-time role at Global Electronic Trading Co., the algorithmic-trading and market-making firm more popularly known as Getco. He was there as the firm was expanding into fixed-income and currency trading. It was during his time at Getco that Baba was mistaken as a thief by Chicago cops, which led him to file a report with the city’s independent police-review authority, an incident he recalled in his later email.
After a stint at Ketchum Trading, Baba joined New York-based Goldman Sachs in 2014 as a 25-year-old on a team that was just starting to make a profitable expansion into the business of electronic trading of rates products.
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Baba was one of seven Black executives named partner in Goldman’s November 2022 class, roughly doubling the total number of Black partners at the firm. By the time he was elevated to the top rank, Baba was co-head of the US dollar linear rates trading group as well as leading the rates group within systematic market-making. That team has even started trading mortgage-backed securities and fixed-income exchange-traded funds using the programmatic-trading model.
In 2020, after his email to colleagues was more widely shared, Baba explained in a Goldman podcast some of his concerns and why he wrote that email.
“I love the work that I do, I find it fascinating, I find it fulfilling,” Baba said. The thing that “is difficult working in the financial-services industry — where one of the things that we work on is wealth creation for our clients — it’s very difficult to deal with that and square your particular privilege and experiences with the things that are happening to other people who look like you.”
Writing the email was something Baba “found to be profoundly uncomfortable” but he did so “because I was hearing from so many analysts and associates across our organization,” he said. They were “trying to make sense of it themselves, and trying to get the people around them to understand why they are upset or angry, or how much it would mean to them if other people within the firm were to reach out to them to ask them how they were doing.”
–With assistance from David Scheer.
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