Ashish Goyal

Ashish Goyal is a recipient of the National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities 2010. This is India's highest civilian award for a disabled individual, It was awarded on 3 December 2010 by President of India Pratibha Patil in New Delhi.[1] In 2015, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.[2]

Goyal was the first blind student at Wharton Business School in Philadelphia. Here he was selected by his peers to receive the Josep P Wharton Award. This is given to the individual who best represents The Wharton Way of Life. He graduated Wharton in 2008, earning an MBA with honours.

Goyal’s experience as an investor in the International Financial Markets spans nearly 15 years; his focus being Global Macro. He uses screen-reading software to check his e-mail, read research reports and look at presentations. When he needs to read graphs, which the software cannot do, he goes through the data and tries to imagine the graph in his head."[3]

He started his international career at J P Morgan’s London office in 2008 and is credited with the distinction of becoming the first visually impaired trader in the world. His grit and determination allowed him to break the barriers on being the first blind trader to work on Wall Street. [3] He started on the prop trading desk at JP Morgan and spent a couple of years in their CIO office. Since then he has managed money as a Portfolio Manager for some of the World’s leading Macro Hedge funds such as Bluecrest Capital, Citadel Investment Group and Tharo Management.

In spite of such a busy and intense career, he is also a motivational speaker and has spoken at the London Stock Exchange, The World Economic Forum at Davos, the Sohn Charity Conference and other corporate and non profit events on his life, investing, the global economy and markets.

Goyal has a strong commitment to giving back to society and helping the under privileged. His areas of involvement span from supporting research on Vedic sciences, Ayurveda, Yoga and has raised thousands of dollars annually for charities including educating underprivileged children in India, Blindness Research and International Peace. He has served as a trustee and an advisor to many international non-profit organisations. He is also a supporter of theatre and arts. Goyal is a big sports fan having played cricket and tennis before he lost his sight. After he moved to London he picked up blind cricket and represented the Metro London Sports Club in 2009 where his team won the UK domestic blind cricket tournament.[3][7]

Goyal was born and raised in Mumbai, India. Born with perfect vision, he has retinitis pigmentosa, which caused his vision to deteriorate from age 7; by 22 he was entirely blind.[5] He dealt with this adversity by focusing his energies on academics. Goyal stood second in his class at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai and also won the 2003 Dun and Bradstreet Best Student Award.[6] He worked at ING Vysya Bank as a fixed income trader in Bangalore for three years before enrolling at Wharton in 2006.

Goyal has been featured multiple times in international and Indian newspapers and has also been interviewed many times on live television.