Capital Allocators · Monday, June 29, 2026
Nicholas Csicsko, a managing director at Trinity Wall Street, shared his unconventional path into investment management, which began with studying music composition at Juilliard. He detailed how an initial interest sparked by investing in 2007, navigating the 2008 downturn, and an internship at Juilliard's endowment led him to a career in finance, eventually joining Trinity in 2016 to help build its investment office.
“Music brought me to New York to study at the Juilliard school. During my master's, I was studying composition, trying to make ends meet, working a lot of jobs. Then all of a sudden, I stayed and joined the doctoral program at Juilliard and it was free. And the doctoral program came with a stipend. I didn't know what to do with that stipend because that was working and paying rent and doing the things people do. I put it in a broker's account and started buying stocks.”
“I talked my way into an internship at Juilliard's endowment. I was there for my first and only intern at the time. It was in-house, it's since been outsourced. The gentleman there at the time gave me a shot. And I started to learn about this whole job.”
“She took a shot on me. I took a shot on her. We started building Trinity out in 2016.”