The youngest member of Goldman’s newest class of managing directors is 29 years old.
Paulo Costa, promoted Thursday, is based in London and spoke to Business Insider about making MD.
The trader leads dividend trading in Goldman’s synthetic products group in EMEA.
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.
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.
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.”
