The FBI is searching for Joshua Aaron, one of the people charged in a massive financial data hacking case, according to a wanted poster released by the organization.

The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, charged Aaron and two others in connection to "the largest theft of customer data from a U.S. financial institution in history."

They were charged in a 23-count indictment related to the computer hacking of several financial institutions and financial news publishers, including a 2014 JPMorgan data breach.

They are accused of stealing the personal information of over 100 million customers, according to the indictment.

Aaron and Anthony Murgio, who is accused in a separate indictment of conspiracy, were previously linked to a cyberattack on JPMorgan. 

Aaron and Murgio were fraternity brothers at Florida State University. Aaron dropped out of college in 2005 and moved to Miami.

He later moved to Israel and in 2011 got involved with a stock fraud scheme with an Israeli friend. In 2014, he married a tax lawyer.

Aaron and Murgio also met up in Russia. And, according to an FBI memo cited by Bloomberg, Aaron had logged in to servers associated with the JPMorgan breach.

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The clock is ticking for Lynn Tilton, founder and CEO of private equity firm Patriarch Partners. 

She has until November 20 to avoid default on one of the firm's credit funds, according to an interview she gave to Bloomberg Television on Tuesday November 10. 

Tilton is being sued over the fund, called Zohar I, by investors who claim they were misled by Tilton about the fund's accounting standards. 

In the interview, Tilton said she owns two-thirds of the notes in Zohar I, which invested in companies controlled by Patriarch Partners. The remaining portion of the notes are owned by MBIA, with which Tilton must negotiate to restructure the debt. Failure to do so, will cause a default. 

"I'm surprised that we're at this point where the maturity will come," Tilton said in her interview. 

The Zohar notes are at the center of a Securities and Exchange Commission case that accuses Tilton of fraud. 

Specifically, the key issue is whether or not her financial statements pertaining to the Zohar funds (there are three: Zohar I, II and III) were prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. 

In a federal filing at the time she raised the funds, Tilton said they were prepared in accordance with GAAP. But, a lawsuit from the investors — which is separate from the SEC's fraud case — says otherwise. 

So, all of a sudden, Tilton's biggest deadline might not come from the courtroom, but from a creditor.

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Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan is looking forward to December. 

He's not necessarily expecting an extravagant gift. But, if Federal Reserve Board of Governors Chairwoman Janet Yellen is making a list, what he wants is a rate hike. 

In an interview with Bloomberg Television's David Westin on Tuesday November 10, Moynihan was asked what a rate hike would do for his business.

"Well we disclosed, and we just - 10-Q within there that basically it's $4.5 billion round numbers [in revenue] for every 100 basis points increase in rates, parallel rate rise."

"[W]hen you have half a trillion dollars in zero interest deposits that are always zero interest and have hit a floor, and when you have loans repriced or rates going up, it's a good thing for a bank. And this has been a very tough environment."

So we've established he wants the Federal Reserve to lift interest rates off from zero, where they have been for nearly seven years. 

But Moynihan also had a pretty solid argument for why it should happen. 

"It's a strong economy," he pointed out. "October is probably one of the strongest months this year relative to October of last year."

Plus, there was last week's eye-popping jobs report. 

"The reality is what that really showed is the fundamental underlying strength of job formation, which is the critical thing," Moynihan said. 

We've got a little over a month to see if Bank of America and Moynihan get the rate hike they're looking for. 

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The American military has been breeding the US' top leaders since the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. 

But once they're done serving their country, many head to the financial services sector. 

That means bringing four-star general experience onto corporate boards, and, the mettle forged in jet fighting missions into management. 

That includes David Petraeus, who headed the CIA before resigning, and, later, taking a post at private equity firm KKR. Others might be surprised to see our list include Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. 

There are a lot of other Wall Street hot-shots, too. Big name banks like JPMorgan and Bank of America have launched ambitious initiatives to bring the military's finest to the forefront of financial services. Often, they're competing with private equity firms like Blackstone and KKR for top talent. 

They come from all branches of the US military: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. They also hail from the reserves. 

For this Veterans Day, Business Insider takes a look at some of the financial sector pros who first learned about hard knocks from a drill instructor. Have a look:

Kelsey Martin was a fighter pilot before joining Goldman Sachs

Kelsey Martin spent more than a decade with the US military, first studying economics at the US Naval Academy and then as a fighter pilot and as an electronic warfare instructor. After his time in the Navy, he headed to the Booth Business School at the University of Chicago for his MBA. A short stint at Morgan Stanley was followed by a 10-year run at Goldman Sachs, where he's currently employed, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Steve Schwarzman did a stint in the reserves before launching his finance career

After a short stint at investment bank Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, a young Steve Schwarzman would briefly take a turn in the US Army Reserves before returning to the world of finance. Following his time in the reserves, Schwarzman would head to Harvard Business School, and then into Lehman Brothers, where his career in finance would take off. Today, he's the 38th richest man in the US, according to Forbes. 

Wesley Clark ran for president, then, ran to private equity

Former General Wesley Clark left the US Army at the rank of General after more than three decades of service in 2000. He would then go on to run for President of the United States — as a Democrat — in 2004 and remained active in politics afterwards. Clark made his move to PE in 2013, joining Steve Schwarzman's Blackstone Group. 

Valeant Pharmaceutical's largest investor, the Sequoia Fund, paid out hard cash to speak with former employees at the specialty pharmacy that's been at the center of Valeant's stock price collapse, The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Rockoff and Michael Rothfeld report.

The Sequoia Fund's manager told the newspaper that it paid five former Philidor employees and one current employee for information. Sequoia also offered one former Philidor employee $1,000 to talk for two hours, the WSJ report said. 

Valeant's stock has fallen more than 43% since Citron Research, the short-selling firm run by Andrew Left, published a report in October asking whether Valeant was operating an Enron-like fraud.

The report focused on the company's mysterious relationship with Philidor, a specialty pharmacy that distributes prescription drugs for Valeant. Citron pointed out that Valeant is the only supplier to Philidor, and it also has an option to buy the company. On Wall Street, no one had really heard of Philidor until last month.

Read the full Journal report here.

Phantom sales

Citron accused Valeant of using Philidor to book "phantom sales."

Valeant has denied any wrongdoing. The company has also now severed ties with Philidor.

Sequoia, the $7.5 billion mutual fund managed by Robert Goldfarb and David Poppe, has been a long-time shareholder of Valeant. 

Ruane, Cunniff, and Goldfarb, which runs the Sequoia Fund, last held 33.88 million shares, or a 9.8% stake, according to regulatory data compiled by Bloomberg. The investment makes up 28.7% of the mutual fund's portfolio.

Despite Valeant's massive decline, Sequoia's managers have defended the company.

"This has caused an extraordinary level of pain, made worse because the most serious allegation leveled against Valeant — that it set up specialty pharmacies as a way to create fraudulent sales and inflate its reported growth rate — is false. As an academic case study, Valeant would be fascinating. As a real life experience, it hurts," the mutual fund's letter to shareholder said.

The mutual fund first got into the stock in the third quarter of 2010, according to Bloomberg. For a long time, the stock had been a huge winner for them.

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There are enemy combatants for as far as the eye can see and complex decisions to be made, the ramifications of which must be carefully calculated lest comrades suffer the most dire of consequences. 

The battlefield sounds an awful lot like Wall Street, come to think of it.

This Veterans Day, Business Insider commemorates US soldiers who served their country, and then went on to successful careers in finance. 

Whether they're experienced Navy SEALs, fighter pilots or Army Rangers, there are countless US military veterans who say that the lessons they learned on and off the battlefield are applicable to everyday life off of it. 

Business Insider rallied the (former) troops from the US Navy, the Army and the Marines, and this is what they said about their time in the military, and how it prepared them for life on Wall Street.

Bud Abbott says the pressure soldiers experience can help them prepare for finance

"The military relies on consistent performance especially under pressure. In the military, this means troubleshooting the main navigation system methodically rather than rushing. In wealth management and these times of higher volatility, the initial reaction of many investors is to do the exact opposite of what they should. They sell when the market is going down and they chase investments that have already appreciated considerably." 

"For me, leadership comes from confidence and remembering what it was like when you were in the subordinate position.  Everyone in the military starts at the bottom and earns their way up.  The great leaders I had in the military treated us as equals and remembered what it was like on the other side and gave us the respect that we deserved." 

"The military also teaches attention to detail whether it is folding a tee shirt or fixing a multi million dollar radar system.  In finance, you need that same quality whether it is trading a stock or analyzing an investment."

John Purcell of Morgan Stanley applied the Navy's standards to private equity

“The Navy gave me a foundation of rigor, focus and high standards that provided me the internal strength and clear guidelines to build a career in a demanding Wall Street environment. For this I am eternally grateful to the service. This same type of training prepares veterans from all services to be strong contributing professionals and leaders across all aspects of the US economy and, will help propel us forward.”

JPMorgan's Ray Ordierno says leaders in the military and on Wall Street need to have peripheral vision

"A military leader needs to be cognizant of more than just strategy; a leader in the financial world has to focus on more than just economics. The political atmosphere, diplomatic relations, security, and public policy all come into play for any given market, and each can significantly affect the others. An effective leader is able to discern how each factor interacts and discern risk and appropriate ways to mitigate risk."

Japanese bank Nomura has lowered its price target for Valeant Pharmaceuticals from $220 to $175.

This after the company hosted a conference call meant to address attacks on its business model from legislators looking into price increases, and authorities and investors concerned about the company's former close relationship with a shady soon-to-be-defunct specialty pharmacy called Philidor.

"Valeant’s business update call did not address all our outstanding questions; however, management’s willingness to be as open as possible in its responses was a positive first step towards rebuilding credibility with investors," wrote analyst Shilbani Malhotra.

"We update our model to incorporate operational disruptions as the company works to rebuild its specialty pharmacy network and deals with pricing issues in its Neurology business."

Philidor distributed Valeant products almost exclusively, contributing to 7% of the company's revenue. Valeant also had paid $100 million for an the option to buy Philidor last December.

However, now that Philidor is out of the picture for Valeant, Wall Street wants to know how the company is going to move that product. Valeant's third largest shareholder, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, suggested on a conference call on Monday that Valeant might announce a solution the following day.

Disappointment

But Valeant had no solutions and few answers regarding the matter on its call on Tuesday. That's why, Malhotra, who has been a big Valeant bull, lowered her target. She still considers Valeant a buy at $82.53.

On Tuesday's call Malhotra asked Valeant CEO Mike Pearson if perhaps he may have acted too quickly in ending its relationship with Philidor last month. Pearson was responding to accusations in a lawsuit uncovered by the Southern Investigative Reporting Institute.

In the lawsuit, a pharmacy that Philidor had purchased a stake in and brought into its "network" called R&O accused the pharmacy of using R&O credentials to access markets where Philidor had been denied a license. It also alleges that Philidor tried to get R&O to sign off for Philidor's sales.

The controversy has contributed to the 52% collapse of Valeant's stock over the last four weeks.

Valeant management has said that the loss of Philidor will be a relative blip on the company's revenue radar.

"I would not be shocked to see some volume declines in the next few weeks," Pearson said on Tuesday. "But I don't think it will be significant."

The company did not give any guidance on the call, saying that all the numbers would come out next month at its investor day, but it did say that it planned to sign a contract with a new specialty pharmacy — one without such a close relationship to Valeant — within 90 days. Then, ideally, everything should get back to normal distribution-wise.

Malhotra isn't convinced the change will be that simple, though (emphasis ours):

The Dermatology business is expected to see a negative impact near term from the company’s decision to sever ties with its former specialty pharmacy partner Philidor, given that the specialty channel strategy was initially designed to support the Dermatology business and a significant amount of dermatology volume flowed through that channel.

We note that while the $190mn of revenue that flowed through Philidor in 3Q15 represented just 6.8% of Valeant’s total sales, it was mostly driven by the Dermatology business and implies that approximately 40% of total segment revenue was generated through the channel. However, Valeant is seeking new specialty channel partners and expects to have a new alternative fulfillment strategy in place within 90 days.

Given this, management expects Dermatology business performance to return to historical levels by 2H16 as the channel shift is expected to affect net pricing and have a minimal impact on volumes. We have taken a more conservative approach, yet our analysis suggests VRX shares offer substantial upside from current levels.

The issues with Valeant's neurology segment that Malhotra mentioned have more to do with Senator Clare McCaskill's (D-MO) recent inquiry into price increases in two drugs, Nitropress and Isuprel. She sent Valeant a long list of questions about them last month, and also included Valeant in a Senate probe into a number of pharmaceutical companies.

The first hearing in the probe is set for December 9.

Malholtra notes that Valeant is trying to work out relief for patients taking Nitropress and Isuprel through hospitals, but in the meantime, this issue will hurt the segment.

"Given this, the Neuro & Other segment is expected to face near-term pressure as Valeant has engaged in contracting negotiations with hospitals for these products and volumes, and thus sales are expected to decline 20% sequentially in 4Q15," she wrote.

"This near term impact is reflected in our estimates, but we also conservatively assume further erosion in 2016 as the company wishes to work with hospitals and may have to offer concessions to high-volume customers."

In other words, it's going to be a tough fourth quarter.

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Bud Light maker Anheuser-Busch InBev announced Wednesday that it has agreed a deal to buy SABMiller.

The deal is worth around $108 billion, and is set to be the biggest takeover so far this year.

That's great news for Wall Street.

Both Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller have reached out to a handful of advisers at investments banks large and small, and the fees are going to be hefty.

Consultant Freeman and Co. previously estimated that advisory fees for those working with the bidder — AB InBev — would be between $95 million and $115 million.

Advisers to SABMiller would be in line for between $100 million and $120 million.

That doesn't include all the banks working on the financing of the transaction. AB InBev has obtained $75 billion of loans for the deal, in what is the biggest loan deal on record. 

So who's getting all the work?

Lazard is the lead adviser to Anheuser-Busch InBev, and there are another five banks advising on the deal, several of which are involved in the financing. They include Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, and Standard Bank. 

Four banks are advising SABMiller: JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and, notably, Robey Warshaw, a 3-year-old, nine-person advisory boutique.

Here's what we know about the bankers on the deal:

Lazard

Alexander Hecker

Hecker is cohead of consumer and retail investment banking at independent investment bank Lazard.

He worked on the InBev-Anheuser Busch deal in 2008 in addition to the more recent Warren Buffett-3G Capital acquisition of Heinz. He has also previously worked on AB InBev’s acquisition of Grupo Modelo, and AmBev’s acquisition of Cerveceria Nacional Dominicana.

Hecker has a history of working with 3G Capital, the Brazilian private equity giant behind AB InBev. He also worked with the firm to take Burger King and Playboy Industries private.

Jean Greene

Greene is a managing director at Lazard. She joined the firm in 1999 and has worked on deals involving Tyco, ITT, and Bon-Ton's acquisition of Saks. Before joining Lazard, Greene covered oil and gas companies at Smith Barney.

William Rucker

Rucker is the head of Lazard in London, and is known as one of UK's top advisers. In the past year alone he has worked on transactions involving UK companies Aldermore, Greene King, Quintain Estates, and Polyus Gold, according to filings. He often gets involved in cross-border deals with the firm’s New York arm.

Charlie Foreman

Foreman joined Lazard in 2009 from Deutsche Bank, and typically focuses on capital-markets transactions. He has also been working on the initial public offering of payment-processing company World Pay, which listed in the UK on Tuesday morning, making it a busy few days.

Other bankers on the deal at Lazard include Mario Skoff in New York, and Richard Shaw and Marcus Taylor in London.

Deutsche Bank

The Deutsche Bank team includes Bruce Evans, Bob Douglas, Simon Denny, Ben Lawrence, Andrew Tusa, and Simon Hollingsworth. Evans is one of the bank's most senior dealmakers, having previously coheaded M&A in the Americas. Denny runs investment banking in South Africa, while Tusa joined Deutsche Bank from Bank of America Merrill Lynch earlier this year as cohead of corporate broking. 

Lawrence has worked on deals involving Shire, BTG, DP World, and Hammerson, while Hollingsworth is a vice president at Deutsche Bank. He joined the firm in June from Credit Suisse.

Barclays

Barclays' team is made up of Wilco Faessen, Gary Posternack, and Mark Todd. Faessen is a consumer-sector specialist, while Posternack is global head of M&A. Todd is a Europe-based M&A specialist.

BNP Paribas

The team at the French bank is made up of Eric Jacquemot, who coheads M&A in Europe, and Bjorn De Carro, who is a consumer-goods specialist.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

The team is made up of veteran consumer and retail-banking specialist Federico Aliboni and Michael Findlay, who coheads UK investment banking. Geoff Iles, an M&A banker who was promoted to managing director last year, also worked on the deal.

Standard Bank

Fradreck Shoko, Ian Carton, and Clive Potter are advising AB Inbev in relation to African matters. 

Robey Warshaw

Simon Robey

Robey coheads the London-based boutique with Simon Warshaw. Before founding his boutique advisory firm three years ago, he was head of UK investment banking and cohead of global mergers and acquisitions at Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley.

In addition to being a star dealmaker, he's also a professional standard singer, according to Financial News. He's chairman of the Royal Opera House board.

Simon Warshaw

Warshaw was the head of investment banking at UBS before joining Robey to form their boutique advisory firm.

He also worked on another giant transaction involving a US company and a UK-listed firm, working with Vodafone on the sale of its stake in Verizon Wireless to Verizon. That deal was valued at $130 billion.

JPMorgan

John Muncey

Muncey is head of JPMorgan's corporate-finance team in the UK. He joined the bank from UBS. He was a managing director in the European consumer team at that bank.

Muncey has a history of expertise in the liquor and beverage industry. According to the FT, his clients include liquor giant Diageo and UK brewer Scottish and Newcastle, in addition to Cadbury Schweppes, Kraft, and Germany's Tchibo.

Dwayne Lysaght

Lysaght is JPMorgan's head of UK mergers and acquisition.

He has worked on a number of deals involving North American buyers and UK targets. He advised UK insurer Brit on its sale to Canadian peer Fairfax earlier this year, and previously worked with AbbVie on its aborted deal with UK pharmaceutical company Shire.

Morgan Stanley

Henry Stewart

Stewart runs UK and Irish investment banking for Morgan Stanley. He is a specialist in the consumer sector and a longtime adviser to SABMiller.

Paul Baker

Baker is an old-school British banker who heads corporate broking for Morgan Stanley. He assumed that role in 2004. Corporate broking is a practice unique to the UK, where public companies name one or more companies as retained advisers.

Goldman Sachs

Gilberto Pozzi

London-based Pozzi is a consumer-sector specialist and was promoted earlier this year from his role as head of M&A in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to global cohead of mergers and acquisitions. He joined Goldman in 1995 as an associate, and made partner in 2008. He has previously worked on deals for Unilever, Kraft Foods, and Jimmy Choo.

Mark Sorrell

Sorrell is cohead of UK investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and is known as an excellent M&A technician. His father, Martin, is the chief executive of advertising giant WPP, while his two brothers also worked at Goldman Sachs for a period. Jonathan Sorrell is now chief financial officer at hedge fund Man Group, while Robert Sorrell joined Moelis & Co. in London last year.

SEE ALSO: The Brazilian private-equity titan who bought Kraft, Heinz, and Burger King is behind the $108 billion Bud deal

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When JCPenney reported results for the second quarter, the news came as a surprise — for most investors.

To a small group though, word that the retailer was seeing better than expected traffic was no shock. These investors, mostly hedge funds, pay a firm called RS Metrics for intelligence on JCPenney's parking lots across America.

Using satellite images, RS Metrics could tell that traffic into the stores was rising in April and May, and its clients were able to get alerts on those increases in near real-time.

And, if they chose, they could trade on those: JCPenney's shares jumped more than 10% after the report, over two days in mid-August.

Welcome to the world of "alternative data," where obscure data sets can be turned into tradable information. It's a cottage industry of tech firms that have sprung up in recent years, processing information on everything from the weather to web searches and selling it for thousands of dollars to hedge funds looking for any advantage they can get.

It is legal (with some parameters), and, in part, it's just the application of sophisticated technology to tasks that research analysts have done for years the hard way. In the past, the same hunch about JCPenney might've been gathered by sending an analyst into several of the company's stores to do a "channel check."

For the providers of this data, it's still early days, says Michael Gantcher, head of sales at RS Metrics.

"It is the Wild West, and I mean that in a positive sense," he said. "It isn't bureaucratic, systematized or over-regulated. The buy side can ask a question it needs answered."

Alternative data

Alternative data refers to anything that is raw or unstructured, and is distinct from things like company filings, historic market prices, or investor presentations.

The industry has sprung up amid an explosion in obtainable data over the past decade, taking in everything from mobile-phone data to job postings to traffic data.

"There is a whole class of emerging data, and that comes from the deployment of million of sensors around the world by governments, companies or consumers," said Adam Broun, chief operating officer at Kensho, a startup in the field that's backed by Goldman Sachs. 

'Microclimates'

"There is better weather data, and you can get much more detail on microclimates. There is traffic data, agricultural data, and every smart phone is a data collection tool. There is web data. The list goes on," said Broun.

In its simplest for, the approach is pretty straightforward. If a company reports revenues on a quarterly basis, and an investor is able to see the same revenue trends in an alternative data set — think website hits, road traffic, or construction permits — then they can get a read on quarterly performance ahead of the competition, explained Erik Haines, chief executive of Quanton Data.

"If you are able to do that to allow you to beat consensus, and you have a $100 million position in that company, that has enormous value," he said.

Cottage industry

The first adopters of the data-driven trading were hedge funds that focus on company fundamentals and use the additional information to test out their hypothesis, according to Gene Ekster, who has worked with alternative data at companies including 1010data and Point72 Asset Management.

Quantitative funds have also zoned in on this kind of data, along with so-called quantamental funds, which mix quant approaches with bottom-up analysis.

They typically either license data and crunch it using their own internals teams, pay for analysis crunched by third parties, or gather the data themselves. The slide below, from a white paper on alternative data published by Integrity Research Associates and written by Ekster, sets out the process.

Traditional mutual-fund investors are also now moving in to the space too. 

Vanguard Group, one of the world's largest asset managers, is using the data to understand market moves better, said John Ameriks, the firm's head of quantitative equity. He cited sources of data ranging from social media to government filings to text analysis. 

"We really want to see, well, what’s the causality chain?" he said.  "When we see something occurring in the marketplace in conjunction with this type of news, with this type of information, or this type of search activity, why do we think that’s leading to a signal ... and what’s the theory behind why it’s gonna persist? And that’s the hard part."

The sources of the data are springing up too, including companies that are generating "exhaust data" as a byproduct of their own internal functions. 

One example is Twitter, which is first and foremost a communications platform, but has found value in the social-sentiment data it is able to pull together.

Elaine Ellis, a marketing manager at Gnip, told Business Insider in September that Twitter sells data to banks and hedge funds directly. 

"A lot of companies are looking at data exhaust to see if there is value there," Kensho's Broun said. They tend to be reluctant to do a lot with it, sometimes for confidentiality and regulatory reasons, or because there isn't a lot they want to do it."

To be sure, there are impediments to the use of this data becoming widespread. Privacy is clearly a key issue. A story in August by Bradley Hope at The Wall Street Journalon the tracking of bank cards caused a storm, for example. According to that story, Yodlee, an online personal-finance firm, sold some bank-card transaction data to firms that were then able to accurately gauge spending at specific retailers. 

Regulation in the sector is still in its infancy too. There are no well-known legal cases that address the use of harvesting web data for investment purposes, for example, according to Ekster.

"Alternative data research compliance is an increasingly important topic and subject of intense discussion in part due to its regulatory ambiguity," he said in the white paper. 

Regardless, it seems that mining raw and unstructured data for investment insights is going mainstream. Investors are hiring data specialists and putting projects in place to make sure they aren't left behind. 

"At some point this isn't going to be alternative data anymore," Ekster said. 

SEE ALSO: There is a new indicator for China's economic activity, and it doesn't look good

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Three decades ago, a former bond trader named Michael Bloomberg wanted the founder of a fast-growing private-equity firm to back his financial-data startup.

But a meeting between the two men — who went on to become two of the richest men in New York City — ended without a deal.

"It makes me sad every time I see him," Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder and chief executive of Blackstone, told Business Insider.

"That was probably an $8 billion mistake," he said.

The reason? Bloomberg, who at the time was ramping up his media and data startup and looking for outside capital, didn't want a partner who would sell. Ever.Steve Fenster, a corporate-restructuring whiz who sat on the board of Bloomberg LP, and was a friend to Schwarzman, helped broker the introduction.

'Legally prohibited'

It was very early on in Blackstone's existence. Private-equity firms, in order to secure capital from outside investors, typically aim to give that cash back to investors, with additional returns, in seven to 10 years.

"I told him, 'We'd love to do this, because you're terrific, but I am legally prohibited,'" Schwarzman recalled.

"Mike wanted to have a partner. His definition of a partner was someone who never sold ... Getting into a situation there's no way out of, was not permissible."

It's a deal that might have rewritten Forbes' list of richest Americans, on which the former mayor of New York City ranks eighth and Schwarzman most recently placed 38th.

Bloomberg LP declined comment when reached by Business Insider.

SEE ALSO: Inside Steve Schwarzman's improbable ride to Wall Street’s throne

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Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman knows which sports team he would buy. 

Business Insider asked Schwarzman that very question at an interview this week, and he picked the New York Knicks after a lengthy pause.

He's also grim about the work that it would entail.

"You'd have to transform the team completely," he told Business Insider. 

Ouch. He's not saying anything that would shock Knicks fans, however. The last time the Knicks were National Basketball Association champions, Studio 54 was still a thing in New York City and Schwarzman had barely started his Wall Street career. 

'One terrific franchise player'

"What you need to be very successful in one of these professional sports arenas is, you need a great owner, a great GM, [and] a great coach," Schwarzman told Business Insider. On top of that, "you need one terrific franchise player."

Woebegone New York Knicks faithful have dreamed for years that the Dolan family, which controls the team, would sell them.

Fans have gone as far as publicly petitioning the current owner to sell the franchise, and recent rumors that the Knicks would finally be dealt to more capable hands only resulted in the sale of Cablevision, a media company that once owned the Knicks.

Schwarzman — if he ever did buy the Knickerbockers — would be joining an elite cadre of private equity veterans, including founders or senior executives at firms such as Bain Capital, Apollo Global Management, and Sun Capital, who have recently spent record amounts to invest in pro-basketball franchises.

And in a way, the Knicks represent the ideal investment for a private equity pro — coming from an industry where "turnaround deals" often entail implementing a completely new strategy. 

There's just one problem, Knicks faithful. He's already given this thought, and it's never going to happen. 

"[New England Patriots owner] Bob Kraft asked me, 'Why don’t you buy a New York team?'" Schwarzman said.

"I said, 'I don’t have the time to make it into a winner.' I don’t have enough time in my life because I’m trying to do that with Blackstone."

SEE ALSO: Inside Steve Schwarzman's improbable ride to Wall Street’s throne

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Deutsche Bank has a new lineup at the top of its huge markets business, as the bank's CEO embarks on a massive restructuring plan.

The shakeup includes the appointment of Ram Nayak to head a new debt-trading unit that will combine rates, credit, foreign exchange, emerging-market debt, and structured-finance trading.

The appointment was announced in an internal memo sent to staff, according to a Deutsche Bank spokesman. 

Nayak was previously head of structuring and chairman of emerging markets. 

Tom Humphrey, who had been global head of credit and head of corporate banking and securities in the Americas, has decided to step down, according to people familiar with the situation. Humphrey is a Wall Street veteran who previously worked at Lehman Brothers. He joined Deutsche Bank just over a year ago.

Thomas Patrick has been named head of global equities, while John Pipilis and Chetankumar Shah have been named coheads of global credit trading. Regionally, the markets business will be led by Zia Huque in the Americas, Michael Ormaechea in Asia Pacific, Tiina Lee in the UK, and Dirk Schmitz in Germany. 

Other key roles include Sam Wisnia, who will head rates in Europe and the Americas, and will head FIC structuring and strategic analytics, and Ahmet Arinc, head of foreign exchange and emerging-market debt. Dixit Joshi will become head of the institutional client group for debt. 

Restructuring

The appointments follow the restructuring of what was corporate banking and securities into global markets and corporate and investment banking. Colin Fan, who had had responsibility for sales and trading under the CB&S construct, left the bank, and equities specialist Garth Ritchie was appointed head of global markets. 

The bank also named a new leadership lineup for the corporate- and investment-banking business on Thursday. 

Deutsche Bank named John Cryan CEO in June, to replace Anshu Jain. 

The German bank said it would take a number of steps to improve returns in the global markets business, including exiting the agency residential-mortgage-backed-securities-trading business. It also said it would rationalize a number of businesses in fixed income and currencies.

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Once distinct lines between Wall Street's banks are becoming increasingly blurred.

Morgan Stanley will offer savings accounts and certificates of deposits to wealth-management clients.

It could mean big business to the bank. A Morgan Stanley representative told Business Insider that the bank's wealth-management clients have $500 billion in cash balances at other institutions. 

The bank already offers consumer services like credit cards, but its move further into territory occupied by Wall Street banks like JPMorgan and Citigroup represents a strategy shift for the bank. 

Reuters reported Morgan Stanley's push into savings accounts and certificates of deposits early on November 12.

Goldman Sachs has also been ramping up their presence in consumer banking.

Earlier this year Goldman Sachs hired Harit Talwar, the former CMO at Discover Financial Services, to lead its push into a lending business for consumers and small businesses. 

Goldman Sachs also acquired the $16 billion lending business that belonged to GE Capital. 

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IEX Group, the stock-trading venue at the center of Michael Lewis' book "Flash Boys," is applying to become a stock exchange, and its rivals are taking shots at it.

The hedge fund and market-making firm Citadel and the big three stock-trading venues — the New York Stock Exchange, BATS Global Markets, and Nasdaq —
have sent letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission questioning some of IEX's central features.

IEX, led by Brad Katsuyama, uses a 350-microsecond "speed bump" designed to level the playing field between hyperfast traders and ordinary traders.

The venue filed to become a stock exchange in September, and firms have been posting their feedback to the SEC since then. All of the feedback is available here.

In a letter published by the SEC on Thursday, the New York Stock Exchange said:

The nature of the IEX application is concerning to us, however. Like the "non-fat yogurt" shop on Seinfeld, which actually serves tastier, full-fat yogurt to increase its sales, IEX advertises that it is "A Fair, Simple, Transparent Market," whereas it proposes rules that would make IEX an unfair, complex, and opaque exchange.

Several of the issues raised are particularly technical, focusing on the finer details of the IEX application. One recurring issue, however, is the very thing that gained IEX notoriety: the speed bump.

The NYSE said the IEX speed bump would "result in the investors receiving stale and misleading quote information." That echoed earlier feedback from Citadel, which said some of IEX's unique features would negatively affect the wider market.

Citadel is a big market maker, accounting for over 14% of US-listed share-trading volume and over 20% of all US-listed equity-options volume.

Speed bump

In its letter, Citadel said share prices could move during the 700 microseconds it takes for a bid or offer to hit the IEX system and come back. And when prices are changing that fast, the IEX's quotes for a stock would be "stale," which could keep people from trading at other exchanges too.

It also said IEX wanted to allow some people to circumvent the speed bump. It said:

It is ironic that IEX — a company supposedly founded to protect investors from various types of latency arbitrage — now proposes to offer pegged orders and IEX Router services that can and will be used by sophisticated trading firms to arbitrage the latency that IEX itself would create.

To make matters worse, although IEX markets itself as a bastion of transparency and fairness, IEX has chosen to remain opaque with respect to critical information about how it will operate. The Application does not explicitly and clearly describe either of these important and selective speed advantages, and other important aspects of IEX’s planned operation.

It added later in the filing:

We are deeply concerned about the negative impact that the proposed IEX structure would have on retail and institutional execution quality, and overall market quality.

The feedback is in contrast to investor responses to IEX's filing. Business Insider reported in October that some of the biggest investors in the business have endorsed the application.

Since then, the fund manager OppenheimerFunds has supported the application, while Virtu, a leading market maker and liquidity provider, said IEX's "speed bump"had no impact on its market making on the platform.

A spokesman for IEX said: "We are reviewing all letters submitted on our Form 1 and look forward to submitting our response letters to material comments, including clearing up any confusion about how our market works, during the review period."

"Our first response letter will address material comments received by the submission deadline of November 6," he added, "and we will submit a follow-on response letter to address material comments received thereafter."

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Goldman Sachs has promoted 425 people to managing director, making it the firm's largest class ever.

"Our new Managing Directors represent the best of our firm’s dedication to excellence, leadership and client service, and we wish them continued success in their careers," Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in a statement.

It's a big deal to be named a managing director. The title is one step below partner, one of the most highly coveted titles in investment banking.

This year's class made history. 

About 30% of the new managing directors are millennials. What's more, 40% of the class began their careers as Goldman Sachs analysts. Then 21% were former Goldman summer interns.

There are 106 women on the list, making up 25% of the class. It's the largest percentage of women in a Goldman managing director class. About 30% of the class worked in multiple divisions and multiple regions. Nearly 49% have at least one advanced degree.

The standout division this year was investment banking, with 96 bankers making managing director, compared to 51 in the previous class. The next class of MDs won't be selected until 2017. In 2013, Goldman changed its managing director selection process from every year to every two years. That year, 280 people made the cut.

The following people have been promoted:

Catherine Addona-Peña
Alokik Advani
Sam Agnew
Daniel Ahern
Murtaza Ahmed
Fusae Akamatsu
Phil Almond
Ana Alonso
Roy Appelman
Juliano Arruda
Alex Ashwal
Daniel Avery
Misty Bailey
Tom Barkes
Jose Barreto
Sushil Bathija
Gregoire Baudot
Olivier Belaich
Sharon Bell
Allison Beller
Christine Benson Schwartzstein
Sam Berberian
Todd Berger
Sandy Bernhardt
Greg Berube
Shashi Bhushan (Bengaluru)
Lyla Bibi
Julie Billings
Alexander Blanchard
Tristan Blood
Katherine Bloom
Alexander Blostein
John Blythe
Andrea Bonini
Vijay Borkar
Jean-Pierre Boudrias
Dyson Bowditch
Rhett Brewer
Sean Brewer
Cameron Brien
Tyler Brooke
Marios Broustas
Melissa Brown
Jacob Buitelaar
Jason Burgess
Manuel Camacho
Tim Campbell
Eliot Camplisson
Susana Cao Miranda
Nicholas Chan
Sorubh Chandani
Amy Chang
Dennis Chang
Scott Chastain
Scott Chen (IBD)
Yu Chikami
Vikram Chima
Sung Cho
Caroline Chu
Simon Clarke
Ray Clifford
Jorge Combe
William Connolly
Ron Cortina
Daniela Costa
Yasmine Coupal
Patricia Creedon
Brian Culang
Michelle Daly
Ranga Dattatreya
Christopher Daur
Brian DeCenzo
Alexis Deladerriere
Robert Devens
Devanshu Dhyani
Scott Dias
Johanna Diaz
Simon Dickinson
Andrew DiMaria
Darren Dixon
Terence Donnelly
Christopher Droege
Lindsay Drucker Mann
Frank Drury
Caroline Dunne
Steven Edwards (Internal Audit)
Jeffrey Egee
Naoko Ehara
Inna Elyashkevich
Jason English
Andrew Erekson
Joris Esch
Ana Estrada
Cristina Estrada
Owain Evans
Julia Feldman
Jing Feng
Albert Ferng
Val Feygin
Dan Fishman
Dennis Fleck
Terence Flynn
Ian Foster (IBD)
Kelly Galanis
Ilya Gaysinskiy
Libardo Gerardino
Said Ghusayni
Michael Gillott
Arvind Giridhar
Mark Glotfelty
Chloe Goddard
Lakshya Goel
Peter Goertzen
Andres Gonzalez
Clara Gonzalez-Martin
Claire Goodeve
Anton Gorshkov
Simon Gosling
Jessica Binder Graham
Michael Graham (Securities)
Glenn Greilsamer
Fabrizio Grena
Alain Griveau
Pierre-Yves Guerber
Renaud Guidée
Renu Gupta
Christoph Haenschel
Simon Hale
Jay Handfield
Deirdre Harding
Nada Hassan
Frances Hawkins
Tobias Heilmaier
Christoph Heuer
Kenneth Ho
Luke Hodges
Jennie Holloway
Matthew Hostasa
Henry Howell
Soomin Hu
Victor Hu
Andrew Huang
Lee Hughes
Michael Hui
Shinichiro Ichiki
George Ingram
Francesca Innocenti
Karen Ip
Yuichiro Isayama
Shubha Iyer
Kristy Jago
Matt Jahansouz
Lear Janiv
Jessica Janowitz
Franklin Jarman
Jabe Jerram
Lei Jin
Moritz Jobke
Charles Johnston
Ganesh Jois
Katherine Jollon Colsher
John Jonke
Shrut Kalra
Emiko Kamoda
Markus Kant
Yugandhar Karna
Lotfi Karoui
Vanya Kasanof
Ting Ke
Kyle Kendall
Richard Kendrick
Corey Kenyon
Anthony Kim
Seong Eun Kim
Sean Kingston
Teresa Kingswood
David Kirschner
Michael Klym
Jared Klyman
Andrew Knight
Timur Kocaoglu
Kevin Kochar
Christina Kopec
David Korpi
Caroline Kraus
Jennifer Krevitt
Ajay Kumar
Raj Kumar
Kosuke Kurosawa
Marc Kurz
Takashi Kuwano
Loredana La Pace
Phil Labbe
Marco Laicini
Vidya Lakshmi
Lia Larson
Kinger Lau
Max Layton
Jerome Lebuchoux
Andrew Lee (GIR)
David Lee (IMD)
Jay Hyun Lee (MBD)
Jerry Lee
Shane Lee
Valerie Leeder
Panayiotis Lemonidis
Joe Lenehan
Daniel Levy
Yael Levy
Olga Lewis
Christina Sun Li
Chuan Li
James Li
Edmund Lim
Stephen Little
David Liu
Daniel Lochner
Michael Loetzsch
Donald Lu
Rochelle Lucas
Matthias Ludemann
Christopher Lvoff
Andrew Lyons
Kristen Macleod
Manju Madhavan
Lynn Magnus
Thomas Malafronte
Sajith Maliakel
Rakesh Manani
Elizabeth Mann
Jim Mannoia
John Manzi
Jia Mao
Guillaume Marinacce
Jeremie Marrache
Matthew Mason
Gaurav Mathur
Yuji Matsumoto
Tom McAndrew
Scott McHugh
Andrew McIlroy
Jenny Meng
Shahmil Merchant
Joann Mercurio
Maryline Mertz
Marco Messeri
Hideo Michiba
Jared Miller
Stacey Miller
Elizabeth Milonopoulos
Pascal Mischler
Pooja Mishra Prahlad
Doretta Mistras
Matthew Mizrahi
Hillel Moerman
Soren Moller-Rasmussen
Fausto Monacelli
Q Montazeri
Leonie Morel
Owen Morris
Daniel Motta
Ricardo Mourao
Christian Mueller-Glissmann
Niladri Mukhopadhyay
Mathieu Munuera
Francis Murphy
Thomas Murray
Charles Myers
Harsh Nanda
Asad Naqvi
Ryan Nash
David Naulty
Toh Ne Win
Shapour Neshatfar
Billy Newport
Anya Newton
Katrina Niehaus
Christos Nifadopoulos
Ryan Nolan
Brian Nordahl
Steven Nowak
Matthew O'Callaghan
John Olivo
Oscar Ostlund
Marco Paesotto
Kanak Palanisamy
Sundaram Pandiarajan
Mrudang Pandya
Francesco Paolicelli
Dhaval Parekh
Keyur Parekh
Akash Patel
Himin Patel
Jatin Patel
Cristina Patron
Nicholas Peach
Agostina Pechi
Xi Pei
Shlomit Perry
Joseph Persky
Carlos Prieto
Ricardo Puggina
Tim Quandt
Stephanie Rader
Emilie Railhac
Amit Raje
Sudarshan Ramakrishnan
Akila Raman
Vishaal Rana
Robert Rancitelli
Zeeshan Razzaqui
Paolo Re
David Reis
Kevin Relihan
Ben Reuter
Matt Rhodes
Clare Richards
Brian Richardson
Richard Rivero
Duane Robinson
Fabiano Romeiro
Agustin Romo Calvo
Karen Rossi
Matias Rotella
Anne Russ
C. Kyle Russ
Jamie Russell
Isidoor Rutten
Timothy Ryan
Craig Sabal
Carolyn Sabat
Michael Sachs
Hassan Salamony
Nicholas Saunders
Carly Scales
Marc Schaffer
Tom Schouwenaars
Jameson Schriber
Leonard Seevers
Masataka Sera
Arpan Shah (Internal Audit)
Dhruv Shah
Nitin Shah
Ashoke Sharma
Nik Sharma
Salil Sheth
Jonathan Shugar
Aaron Siegel
Eric Siegel
Julie Silverman
Jim Sinclair
Balaji Sivasubramanian
Neil Slee
Martin Smith (IMD)
Scott Smith
Lin Smyth
Douglas Spell
David Sprake
Jack Springate
Sujatha Srinivasan
Ricardo Stabile
John Startin
John Stecher
Alexander Stiles
Peter Stone
Miruna Stratan
Matthew Straughen
Hiroyuki Sugiura
Joseph Sumberg
Philip Sun
Lawrence Tankel
Richard Tarling
Ian Taylor
Mike Taylor (Services)
Sophie Taylor
Latifa Tefridj-Gaillard
Kurt Tenenbaum
Prasanna Thati
Radha Tilton
Vincent Tiseo
Jandirk tom Dieck
Margo Topman
Shinsaku Toriyama
Dom Totino
Joseph Traina
Matthew Traina
Alexis Tsang
Tetsuya Ukai
Silvia Valente
Laura van Alkemade
Carol Van der Vorst
Alexis Vassilakas
Kerone Vatel
Thomas Vaughan
Meriel Vessey
Alexandra Vincenzi
David Wade
Dennis Walsh
Alex Wang
Jun Wang
Moon Wang
Katherine Ward
Amy Watson
Peter Watson
Whitney Watson
Gregory Watts
Jie Wei
Michael Weiss
Miriam Wheeler
Pete Williams
Wes Williams
Jiahong Wu
Tony Xu
Michael Yaeger
Satoshi Yamagata
Huan Yang
Jonathan Yarrow
Sylvia Yeh
Vincent Yeung
Derek Yi
Jon Yoder
Jaewon Yu
Brendan Zeigon
Daniel Zimmerman
Martin Zoll

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Goldman Sachs just promoted 425 people to managing director — the highest ranking you can achieve before making partner — and the list of people chosen is very telling.

About 30% of the new managing directors are millennials, and a huge chunk of them have been with Goldman their entire careers.

Around 40% of the class were hired at the entry level as analysts, and 20% started out as summer interns, according to the firm.

It's further proof of Goldman's efforts to hold onto its own.

The firm wants a bigger percentage of the graduates it hires to spend a full career at the bank, rather than just spending a couple of years there and then leaving for hedge funds, private equity, or other industries, which is a common career path among junior bankers.

'Build their careers here'

Last week, Goldman Sachs announced an overhaul to the way it promotes and rewards investment bankers at the junior level.

"Everything that we're doing is to try to give us the best opportunity to develop the best of those people and have a subset of them want to build their careers here," said David Solomon, Goldman's cohead of investment banking. "Not all of them, but a subset of them."

The firm will start promoting top investment-banking analysts to associates after only two years at the firm.

Typically, investment banks hire "analysts," or junior bankers, for a two-year program directly out of college. After the analysts put in their two years, most move on to other jobs outside of banking.

Those who stay on usually do a third year as analysts before being promoted to associates. But Goldman did away with its two-year analyst program a couple of years ago in an effort to encourage junior bankers to see themselves at the bank more long term.

The new third-year promotion anounced last week means that junior bankers will get a pay raise sooner than they normally would. Across Wall Street, associates earn about $63,000 more than analysts, on average.

It also means that they are on a faster track to becoming vice presidents, and eventually managing directors.

Another reward is a formal "mobility program" the firm is introducing for junior bankers in their third year.

After completing two years in one assignment, analysts — some of whom are promoted to associates — will go on rotational assignment for another full year.

A third initiative will see changes in the type of work that Goldman's junior bankers are doing.

The firm is introducing new technological platforms to pick up some of the grunt work and enable analysts to focus on more value-added work.

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The investment-banking division at Goldman Sachs is killing it, and it really shows in the new managing-director list.

On Thursday, Goldman promoted 425 people to managing director, making it the largest class of MDs in the firm's history. Managing director is highest ranking you can achieve before making partner.

The standout division this year was the investment-banking division, with 96 bankers joining the class. The last class, which had 280 people total, had only 51 bankers.

Bankers made up 22.5% of the MD class this time around, versus 18.2% last time around.

The shift is important, as the newly appointed managing directors will help shape the future of the bank. Goldman's investment bank has moved back into the ascendancy following the financial crisis, as post-crisis regulation and low interest rates have crimped trading revenues.

Crushing it

Goldman has been crushing it in investment banking, reporting revenues of $5.5 billion for the first nine months of the year, the highest since the first nine months of boom year 2007.

The financial-advisory business, otherwise known as M&A, is having a stellar year, with revenues of $2.6 billion for the first nine months. That is up 45% on the same period in 2014. Equity and debt capital markets revenues are down year-on-year, in contrast.

Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive, said in the quarterly earnings report that the bank continued to experience strong levels of activity in investment banking. The bank later said in its 10-Q filing that the expected revenues from the bank's backlog of deal work grew in the third quarter.

The performance of the sales and trading business hasn't been nearly as strong. Revenues from equity and fixed-income sales and trading over the first nine months are up 2%, with the fixed-income component of that down 14%. 

The title of managing director is reserved for the firm's top performers. It's a big honor. It's just one level below being made partner, one of Wall Street's most coveted titles.

Goldman had been selecting managing directors every year since 1996. In 2013, Goldman switched to a biennial selection, which explains the historic class size.

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Just when you thought there couldn't be another way to make Black Friday any more miserable for shoppers and retail employees, the credit-card industry came up with one.

Credit-card companies last month began to mandate new technology that uses chips instead of magnetic stripes. It's a change made for a very good reason: card security.

The credit-card industry self-imposed October 1 as the deadline for the new card readers, though many consumers had received chip-enabled credit and debit cards — which will still work on the old "swipe" card processors — long before that.

The timing of this wider rollout, however, has retail and payments experts warning that this will slow things down at the checkouts on the November 27 shopping day.

"Any time you introduce a major change like this, there's going to be confusion," said Matt Schulz, senior industry analyst with CreditCards.com. "There's no question this is going to cause some slowdown on Black Friday."

The change itself is simple: Instead of swiping the card through the magnetic-strip reader, shoppers now have to insert it — chip side up — into a slot on the bottom of the device.

But here's where the delays come in. People who are unfamiliar with the process will swipe as they always have, then be told it didn't work because they have a new chip-enabled card. Then they must be shown how to insert it, and leave it in, so the payment can be processed.

Now multiply that by thousands, and add in the fact that people have been in line since the crack of dawn, elbowed their way to that bargain bin, and then had to wait again just to get to the register, and you can see why even a small delay will test patience. It's called the EMV chip, and it just might wreak havoc on holiday shopping.

A 'rude awakening' for retailers

"There is going to be a rude awakening" for retailers, said Jared Drieling, business intelligence manager for The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha, Nebraska-based advisory firm focusing on payments. "The industry is still bickering over how long an EMV transaction takes."

As many as 47% of US merchants will have new technology in place by the end of 2015, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Payments Security Task Force, an industry-backed group of financial services firms and leading retailers. Already, 40% of Americans have been issued new chip-enabled cards.

Of course the nightmare scenario that Drieling is warning about is dependent on a lot of factors. Some customers have been using the chip technology for weeks, and some retailers don't have the readers yet. There is a wide disparity in how individual retailers have gotten ready for the switch.

Best Buy, Macy's, and Walmart stores have been fully outfitted with new card readers, representatives for those companies said. Macy's and Walmart have also reissued store-branded credit cards with new EMV chips embedded in them. Sears, on the other hand, says it is "continuously working to further enhance the security of our systems," according to a spokesman — but declined to provide specifics for Black Friday.

J. Craig Shearman, a spokesman for the National Retail Federation, said the new card readers would be at "most major retailers and large national chains." The progress of smaller shops in adapting the chips is not as clear, but those shops are less likely to be open the day after Thanksgiving anyway.

Shearman didn't argue with the notion that things could slow down, but he said it was not clear how much longer it would take to process each transaction.

For retailers, Black Friday and the ensuing weekend is crucial to performance. Americans packed malls and stores last year after Thanksgiving, driving more than $50 billion in revenue to retailers, the National Retail Federation reported in 2014.

Of course, there are lots of ways to avoid even having to find out. Stay home. Turkey and stuffing is better on day two anyway.

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Porter Braswell was working his way up the ladder at Goldman Sachs, first as an intern and then as an analyst on its macro foreign exchange desk. 

But he also realized his opportunity was rare — perhaps, too scarce. 

"There are tons of hiring platforms but none of them have a focus on a diversity first approach," he told Business Insider. 

He partnered up with another young Goldmanite, Ryan Williams, to launch Jopwell. 

"We both felt through the usage of technology we could expose more people to various professional opportunities and break down the traditional barriers that lead to a lack of diversity in the workforce," Braswell said.

"Ryan and I knew a lot of talented minority candidates through our various networks, and we saw a hugely exciting opportunity to address that gap at scale through technology."

Goldman bought in, as well: Braswell said the bank was one of the first companies to begin using Jopwell's recruitment platform. 

Other companies they have partnered with include Square, BuzzFeed, Facebook and Morgan Stanley. 

Jopwell has also attracted big names into its capital structure. Earlier this year, startup backer YCombinator joined in a $1 million round to back the company's development. 

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