Although his hometown, just outside Atlanta, wasn’t much of an Ivy League recruitment area, Gray Smith knew early on that he wanted to attend Harvard University and work on Wall Street. After graduating from Harvard with an economics degree in 2003, Smith landed in the media investment banking group at Lehman Brothers Holdings. But he soon realized that he was more interested in real estate and moved to New York–based hedge fund Millennium Management in 2005 as part of a real estate and real estate–related investment team. Smith, 33, left Millennium after the 2008 market meltdown for little-known but well-respected hedge fund firm J Goldman & Co. at the end of 2009. In February, seeking to further expand his horizons, he joined New York–based multistrategy hedge fund Caxton Associates as a consumer portfolio manager.
