Best is yet to come with 40 Under 40

The excitement and energy in the room was not only palpable but contagious.

I'm talking about the luncheon we held last week at our offices in New York for our inaugural class of 40 Under 40s. As soon as I walked into the room and scanned the crowd of young, engaging and very sharply dressed people — all laughing, talking and exchanging business cards — I felt like an underachiever … a very old underachiever, at that.

Though our 40 honorees span the country, more than half were able to attend our luncheon. I am not going to call out any specific honorees by name. No, to find out who we picked, you'll have to come to our website on June 23 or read the print edition of InvestmentNews that week.

But let me just say that you'll be impressed. Some honorees no doubt will be folks you already know from reading InvestmentNews. But I hope most are people you'll be meeting for the first time.

GREAT POOL

We had a terrific pool of candidates to choose from. When we began accepting nominations for 40 Under 40 in March, I remember thinking that we would be lucky to receive more than a couple of hundred nominations. Five hundred nominations, I thought, would be out of this world.

In the end, we received nearly 1,200 qualified nominations.

So picking just 40 was no easy task.

But we sifted through each submission and did our own research. In the end, we picked the best and brightest among the exceptional young talent within the financial advice industry.

We are working hard at InvestmentNews to put out a 40 Under 40 that will blow you away. Over the next two weeks, the entire newsroom — from our reporters and editors to our art department and website developers — will be focused on this project.

Stay tuned.

[email protected], Twitter: @fredpgabriel