Dan Chung Rebuilt Fred Alger Management After 9/11 Tragedy
Dan Chung survived the 9/11 attack by chance and led the firm's revival after 35 staffers perished. He continues leading Alger Management today.
Dan Chung, CEO and chief investment officer of Fred Alger Management, survived the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by chance — and was then handed one of Wall Street's most harrowing mandates: rebuild a firm that lost 35 employees in the World Trade Center collapse. The dual role of grief and reconstruction defined Chung's early leadership and set the tone for the investment culture he would go on to forge.
The scale of Alger's loss that day was staggering even against the broader devastation of 9/11. Thirty-five staffers — a significant portion of the firm's workforce — were killed, leaving an organization that had to reconstitute not just its headcount but its institutional knowledge, client trust, and investment process almost from scratch. Chung, who escaped the attacks by circumstance rather than design, stepped into that void and shouldered the responsibility of keeping the firm alive.
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What followed was a years-long effort to restore Alger Management's standing as a growth-oriented investment boutique. Chung's leadership through that period demonstrated a rare capacity to manage both the human and operational dimensions of catastrophic loss simultaneously — a quality that has continued to shape his approach to running the firm and identifying market winners in the decades since.
Today, Chung remains at the helm of Fred Alger Management, still steering the firm's investment strategy and hunting for companies with strong growth potential. His tenure stands as one of the more remarkable stories of institutional resilience in modern American finance, rooted in a tragedy that reshaped the firm's identity and his own.
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