Mona El Isa
Bio
“Former star-trader at Goldman Sachs, promoted to Vice President by the age of 26 and made the “top 30 under 30” list in Trader Magazine in 2008 and Forbes Magazine in 2011 after profitably trading the 2008 and 2011 crashes. Moved to Geneva-based macro fund Jabre Capital in 2011, before deciding in 2014 that the future of finance lay in blockchain technology. She studied Economics & Statistics at the University College London.”
- From The Defiant (23-11-2020):
"My background is in traditional finance. I spent most of my career there. I started straight out of university on the Goldman Sachs trading floor in London. I was trading cash equities initially, and market making, and pretty soon afterward, they also gave me a proprietary book to trade for them. I was basically using the firm's capital to invest across equities initially, and then derivatives, futures, commodities, CDS, and all that stuff. It was a fun, very high adrenaline job. I spent nearly a decade there and then move to work with one of our hedge fund clients, where I was a long short portfolio manager for four years.
My last career move before forming Melon was to try and launch my own hedge fund, and this was a complete disaster. I was completely going into this opportunity with starry eyes and dollar signs and thinking finally, I can launch my own business. I had a seed investor who's willing to give me $20 million to get started, which was really small compared to what I had been managing previously in my two previous jobs. But I was thinking, this is my baby, and I can grow it and I can really make something out of it. It turned out to be a complete disaster.
I was completely unprepared for the high barriers to entry and asset management for a starting emerging manager. I was completely unprepared for the high cost, not just money, but also the time required to set up a fund, research, all the different service providers, etc. I was also very spoiled: when we were in the larger institutions, we just had people doing stuff for us all the time, which you just take for granted. I closed the fund after a year, and was pretty depressed and upset about how bad it had gone. The next thing was basically Melon, how to make it better.
