At an Olympic wrestling practice in Paris in 2024, Joshua Weintraub found something to do besides watch. While the athletes worked through their training, he practiced jiu jitsu with his colleague Bill Kloos and Justin Ruiz, the Greco-Roman program’s general manager. The team leader was getting some training of his own.
It is a small scene, and a useful place to begin. Weintraub’s business title is Chief Executive Officer of Residential Opportunities and Senior Managing Director at Cerberus Capital Management. That description puts him in the world of mortgage loans, investment portfolios and residential property. In Paris, another part of his life was visible: a continuing attachment to combat sports, carried well beyond his university years.
The juxtaposition is amusing without requiring a theory about bankers being gladiators. A mortgage security and a wrestling opponent demand rather different kinds of attention. Weintraub has spent decades working with the former and learning various forms of the latter. By the summer of 2024, those two strands had brought a New York investment executive into the support team for American Olympic wrestlers.
His place there had a specific purpose. He was the Greco-Roman team leader, a role separate from the athletes competing and the coaches preparing them. The athletes would take the mat under their own names. Weintraub belonged to the group helping make their participation possible. Even at the Olympics, there is work to be done before the audience gets its spectacle.
Lehigh, gloves and a banking education
At Lehigh University, Weintraub studied economics and international business, earning a dual B.A. and graduating with high honors in 1991. He also boxed for the university and became team captain in his junior season. In 1990 he reached the final of the East Coast Championships held at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Those details give his undergraduate years two distinct measures of progress: academic achievement and competition. Boxing was already an organized commitment, with teammates and a captaincy, rather than an occasional diversion. The later wrestling appointment would arrive more than three decades after that championship appearance. The interval matters. This was a sporting interest with a long history.
His first banking chapter was at Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1991 to 1993. There he completed the Management Development Program for Operations and Systems. The program’s name has none of the glamour usually attached to Wall Street. Operations and systems are the machinery behind the transaction, the part that has to function after the conversation is over.
Weintraub then moved into mortgage markets. He traded whole loans and agency and non-agency collateralized mortgage obligations at Lehman Brothers from 1993 to 1999. Greenwich Capital followed in 1999 and 2000, with responsibility for agency and non-agency CMO and derivative trading. Bear Stearns came next. His early career was accumulating experience within one complicated field, across several institutions, rather than hopping between unrelated industries.
The mortgage desk grows into a platform
At Bear Stearns, from 2000 to 2007, Weintraub headed the agency CMO, mortgage derivative and pass-through businesses. In 2008 he co-headed U.S. residential mortgage, asset-backed securities and CDO trading. He joined Cerberus that same year and served as vice chairman of Residential Capital from 2008 to 2009. The institutional names changed; the residential-credit thread continued.
By 2013, his responsibilities included heading RMBS securities and trading at Cerberus. He was also named co-chief investment officer in the registration statement for Cerberus Mortgage Capital, alongside Brendan Garvey. The investment committee described there included Stephen Feinberg, Frank Bruno and Lee Millstein, with Weintraub as chair. These were roles within a group of investment professionals, each bringing a different part of the decision-making process.
His present remit extends across a residential platform. The mortgage-credit business focuses on the United States and Western Europe. Cerberus and affiliated funds and accounts established FirstKey Mortgage in 2013 to support loan acquisition and securitization. In 2014, the firm expanded its residential opportunities work into single-family rentals. FirstKey Homes provides acquisition and property-management services, and Weintraub helped lead the development of that national rental platform.
The two FirstKey names are easy to confuse, but their functions make the distinction clear. FirstKey Mortgage works with loans and the process of financing them through securities. FirstKey Homes works with rental properties. They connect the investment business to different practical tasks: examining collateral in one case, acquiring and managing homes in the other. A residential strategy eventually has to meet the particulars of a loan or a property.
A bond at a time
In a 2012 interview, Weintraub described an opportunity in residential mortgage-backed securities created by an imbalance between sellers and buyers. Financial institutions were reducing exposure, while several traditional sources of demand were constrained. His argument was that prices could remain depressed even as some underlying housing fundamentals improved. It was a dated investment thesis about the conditions then prevailing, rather than a permanent rule for buying mortgages.
He emphasized the underlying borrowers and the risks that could change an investment’s outcome: prepayments, delinquency, recoveries and public policy. He also emphasized the need to reduce risk, describing the “expertise and discipline needed to take risk off.” The attention to an exit is a useful corrective to the more theatrical picture of distressed investing, in which the purchase gets all the applause.
The method he described was selective, involving individual securities and a diversified portfolio. The interesting unit of attention was the bond, with its own collateral and its own exposure to borrower behavior. A view on the economy supplied context; the investment still required decisions about a particular instrument. Broad conviction and close examination had different jobs.
A later transaction gives this work a concrete scale. In June 2017, New York Community Bancorp announced an agreement to sell most of its one-to-four-family residential mortgage-related assets to a Cerberus affiliate. The assets had a carrying value of approximately $1.9 billion as of March 31 that year. That figure describes the bank’s assets, rather than Weintraub’s personal wealth or a disclosed purchase price.
Weintraub’s comment on that transaction emphasized partnering with financial institutions, including the work of FirstKey Mortgage. The announcement also separated the residential-asset transaction from the sale of the bank’s mortgage banking business to another buyer. The distinction is small enough to disappear in a headline and large enough to matter in understanding what his team was doing.
“Expertise and discipline needed to take risk off.”Joshua Weintraub / 2012
The black belt keeps its own calendar
Alongside this career, Weintraub continued his martial-arts training. He received a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt in 2018 and his first stripe in 2021. His teachers in New York included Zed Chierighini, Mike Jaramillo and Renzo Gracie. By the time of his national-team appointment, his involvement included teaching as well as practicing.
The chronology is its own quiet joke. A senior investment professional could accumulate an impressive business biography and still have a separate rank to earn elsewhere. The black belt arrived a decade after he joined Cerberus. It belongs on a different calendar from promotions and transactions, with a different set of teachers attached.
In September 2021, USA Wrestling appointed Weintraub team leader and Kloos assistant team leader for the Greco-Roman national team through the Paris Games. Their remit included supporting athletes, coaches and staff and leading the delegation at major events. Their first assignment was the 2021 Senior World Championships in Oslo. The appointment converted an existing interest into a formal responsibility.
Weintraub was subsequently listed as team leader for the Greco-Roman delegation at the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago. The updated roster included Kamal Bey, Zac Braunagel, Josef Rau, Cohlton Schultz and Ildar Hafizov. The international itinerary was part of the role, with a team to support at each stop.
For Paris, the American Olympic wrestling contingent comprised 16 athletes: six in men’s freestyle, six in women’s freestyle and four in Greco-Roman. Herb House was the national Greco-Roman head coach; Justin Ruiz was the program director. Weintraub’s team-leader listing sat alongside their responsibilities. The practice-room scene makes sense within that arrangement: a supporter with his own long sporting history, among people whose daily work was the sport itself.
A place on someone else’s team
Weintraub’s commitments also include Hire Heroes USA, which supports military veterans moving into civilian employment. His Cerberus biography lists him as a board member, and the nonprofit’s 2020 annual report lists him among its directors. It is another organization in which his role sits alongside the work of staff and other board members.
In August 2016, Hire Heroes USA announced that Weintraub would join its delegation for the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The occasion marked the organization’s 11,000th lifetime veteran hire. Brian Stann, then its president and chief executive officer, and founder John Bardis were among the participants. The exchange supplied the stage; employment supplied the reason for gathering there.
That distinction gives the moment its substance. An opening-bell photograph captures a few people in a familiar financial setting. The milestone concerned thousands of people finding work elsewhere. Weintraub’s connection was through service on the nonprofit’s board, alongside a professional career already rooted in the financial markets.
Taken together, the dated details make a portrait with several kinds of participation. At Lehigh, he captained a boxing team. At Cerberus, he leads a residential investment platform. In jiu jitsu, he trained under named instructors and went on to teach. With USA Wrestling, he took a supporting leadership role through an Olympic cycle. Each setting gives him a different position among other people.
The Paris practice room brings those details back to human scale. The chief executive’s title is long. The trading history is technical. The black belt has its own history of instruction. Then there is the smaller, livelier fact: while Olympic wrestlers trained, Joshua Weintraub practiced jiu jitsu with two colleagues. A career can fill a page of acronyms. An afternoon on the mat needs only a few names.