Leon Cooperman started life as the son of a plumber living in the South Bronx. He worked his way into Hunter College, working as a Xerox quality control engineer in the mid-60's, until he went to Columbia Business School for an MBA. The day after Leon Cooperman graduated, he was snapped up by Goldman Sachs. There, he worked his way from conducting investment research in the company's asset management arm to becoming the general partner and chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. He retired from those position at the end of 1991, after 25 years of service - but Leon Cooperman wasn't done with the financial world yet. In 1991, Leon Cooperman founded Omega Advisors, a roughly $3.4 billion hedge fund based in New York City.

Omega advisors invests in domestic public equity and hedging market.

Leon Cooperman uses this strategy that focuses on investing in value equities, while using a top down approach to select the sectors, coupled with a long short fundamental analysis. He uses a bottom-up approach to create his portfolios, benchmarking their performance against the S&P 500 index. When discussing the recent financial crisis, and its affect on the financial markets, Leon Cooperman has said, "I think all we've learned is what we already knew, is that stocks have become like commodities, regrettably, and they go up to limit and they go down to limit. And we've also known over the years that when they go down, they go down faster than they go up."