Vail Christian High School Alumni Feature: Tommy O’Neil ‘19
Tommy O'Neil's journey has been remarkably unique, from a small, mountain-town education to
the epicenter of New York’s financial district. A relentless seeker of knowledge and opportunity,
Tommy has transformed his early curiosity about politics, markets, and investing into a thriving career in the investment management industry. Now a Risk Analyst at Interval Partners, he navigates the complexities of global financial markets with the same analytical precision and intellectual curiosity that defined his academic journey.
After graduating from VCHS in 2019, Tommy attended Georgetown University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with a minor in Business Administration in 2023. While at Georgetown, he was actively involved in social clubs, intramural sports, and the student investment fund. He also studied abroad in Copenhagen for a semester.
Tommy’s career journey has had many stepping stones along the way. He first secured an internship with U.S. Senator Michael Bennett during his sophomore year, where he gained firsthand experience in public policy. However, he grew interested in investing and learning about financial markets. He pursued this interest by first networking within the Vail Valley community and landed a summer internship at Macro Intelligence 2 Partners, a boutique macroeconomic research firm for institutional investors in Vail. This experience gave him valuable exposure to quantitative research, statistical modeling, and the investment management industry, setting the foundation for his future career. During his junior summer, Tommy secured an equity sales and trading internship at Nomura, a global financial services firm in New York City. This experience further solidified his passion for investing and markets.
After graduating from Georgetown, Tommy joined Interval Partners, a Long/Short Equity Multi-Manager Hedge Fund in New York City. As a Risk Analyst, Tommy assists the firm’s portfolio managers and traders with neutralizing market risk in each of its core strategies and achieving targeted risk profiles for the firm’s institutional investment clients. His role requires a top-down approach to understanding what drives markets, including economic data, thematic trends,
shifting policy, geopolitical developments, and macro catalysts. Fundamental to his role is working with large datasets and building sophisticated statistical models. His quantitative skill and ability to analyze data and distill information helps him decompose market movements and closely monitor portfolio exposures through market volatility. Tommy enjoys his work because of how closely he is attached to what's going on both in the US and worldwide and because of the quantitative nature of his job.
Tommy attributes much of his academic and career success to his early years at VCHS. He credits his math teachers, Tyler Jager and Doug Bruce, for igniting his love for numbers and problem-solving, and Camille Cooper and the English department for teaching him how to think critically - an important skill for isolating signals from noise. His VCHS education played a crucial role in shaping his analytical mind and spurring his intellectual curiosity, which has been
key to his journey.
For current VCHS students, Tommy offers this advice:
“Be as relentlessly determined and hungry as possible in working towards your goals. Failure and rejection are just part of the process; it’s normal. Learn from it and keep on going.”
His journey from a small high school in Colorado to a thriving career in the world’s financial capital is a testament to the power of determination and persistently working towards long-term goals.
Tommy O’Neil’s story inspires all Saints, proving that anything is possible with the right foundation and unwavering determination.
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