Guts | Hustle | Progress

This college student has an unlikely full-time job: He runs a $4.7 million long-short equity hedge fund.

In themselves, the numbers put up by Caelum Capital, as Graves’s five-person firm is known, are impressive. For a fund piloted by a kid who has no professional investment training and who only recently moved out of the dorms, they are uncanny. Last year, when the average equity hedge fund manager was down 26.4 percent, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research, Graves was up 40.6 percent. In 2007 he returned 174.1 percent, after more than tripling his money the previous year — and nearly doubling it the year before that.

Part-time student, full-time trading...