A former bond trader who called it quits at 28 has created a pipeline to the Ivy League and Wall Street’s top rungs from an unexpected place: A public high school in Gainesville, Florida.

One former math team alum is now a trader at Citadel Securities. Another became the youngest-ever partner at venture capital firm Canaan Partners. Scores of others also work in finance.

All of them went through the math team at F.W. Buchholz High School, which for the last two decades has been led by lanky 63-year-old alum Will Frazer. The ex-Lazard trader has built the team into a powerhouse rivaled only by a few prestigious US institutions like New York’s Stuyvesant, whose alumni have won several Nobel Prizes, and Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where Robinhood Markets Inc. co-founder Vlad Tenev attended before heading to Stanford University.

As rookie bankers grapple with the tradeoff between six-figure salaries and a culture of working nights and weekends, Frazer’s own story is an example of how to chart a different course, while staying true to the qualities that draw young go-getters to the business.

“Wall Street made me into a more competitive person,” Frazer said. “I’m trying to develop a competitive culture here, too.”

Senators Notice
Frazer’s achievements have caught the eyes of a group of Florida state senators, who met with him last month to learn how they might replicate Buchholz’s success. The state, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, has drawn the national spotlight for rejecting almost half of suggested math textbooks for the upcoming school year for teaching critical race theory and for a law critics call “Don’t Say Gay,” which restricts educators from classroom instruction around LGBTQ issues.

All the while, Florida is struggling with lagging test scores and low public school enrollment in the wake of the pandemic. Buchholz has some advantages contending with these challenges, including its proximity to the University of Florida. Still, U.S. News ranks it 66th among the state’s high schools and 1,172th nationally. (Stuyvesant is 36th. Thomas Jefferson is first.)

“For one person to take a public school and do what he’s done is amazing,” said Keith Perry, a state senator who represents Gainesville and surrounding counties in central Florida. “That should give everybody optimism.”

After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Frazer moved to New York to work at Lazard, an investment bank. The 1980s were a heyday for Wall Street, and few commanded as much influence as bond traders. They were dubbed “masters of the universe” in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

The money was good, but Frazer’s chain-smoking bosses and the late-night drinking didn’t make a long career on Wall Street seem attractive.

“I just didn’t feel healthy,” Frazer said.

Ferrari Purchase
After a stint at the now-defunct investment firm Ehrlich Bober & Co., Frazer had enough. He bought a Ferrari, drove home to Gainesville, and planned for a life of golf and sun.

He started coaching golf at Buchholz before becoming a math teacher. He took the team to a math competition in 1998 and got crushed, which set him on a furious mission to improve.

Fast forward to April: The Buchholz team won its 15th state title in 17 years at the Mu Alpha Theta math competition. In the 2020-21 school year, a larger number of its students qualified for a rigorous nationwide event called the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, which accepts the top 5% of scorers on a qualifying exam, than all but three other elite schools.

Colleagues and former team members say the success has less to do with Frazer’s own technical ability -- one of his former students, Ziwei Lu, actually teaches the toughest material -- and more to do with a culture that resembles Frazer’s Wall Street past.

“Winning and competing was so core to who he is, so for any student who had that itch it’s really a positive impact,” said Laura Chau, a Buchholz math team alum. Chau later studied engineering at Stanford and became the youngest-ever partner at Canaan Partners.

Summer Camp
Ellen Li competed on the team all four years before studying math at Harvard University and landing a job as a trader at Citadel Securities. Teamwork and solidarity were the key ingredients in the team’s success, Li said -- though the fact that Frazer runs a 20-hours-per-week summer math camp helps, too. Florida’s public schools on average offer about 72 hours a semester with teachers. 

Yet when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Frazer took his competitive streak to a new level.

After in-person teaching was halted, he formally resigned from his job at Buchholz and snagged a space at a nearby church, where about 140 of his students gathered. He says parents were largely on board, even helping to raise funds to cover his lost wages. He’s since returned to the school.

Not everyone agreed with the approach, including his competitors. But, just like on Wall Street, the results speak for themselves.

Richard Rovere, the coach of the math team at Miami-area private school American Heritage, has adapted his own team’s methods over the years based on Frazer’s success. But that latest gambit was one he couldn’t follow.

“He gambled, he rolled the dice and he won,” Rovere said. 

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.