hedgefund.wiki — institutional knowledge base

Jessica Shill

People · CC-BY-4.0

Jessica Shill didn't know she'd be working with CLO ETFs when she joined Janus Henderson Investors in August 2019. Six years later, she's a portfolio manager overseeing three ETFs with a combined $24.3 billion in assets — products that brought a traditionally opaque institutional strategy to mainstream investors for the first time. At 30, Shill has been at the center of two separate revolutions in asset management. The first was the democratization of collateralized loan obligations through ETF wrappers — taking complex, structured credit products that were previously accessible only to large institutions and making them available to everyday investors. Her team grew from a small group to more than 20 people as assets exploded. The second revolution is just beginning. Shill recently helped launch and develop the strategy for Janus Henderson's first tokenized fund, which gathered nearly $800 million in assets since its June 2025 debut. She's betting that blockchain technology will fundamentally improve how asset management operates — reducing settlement times, increasing transparency, and enabling fractional ownership of traditionally illiquid instruments. "Launching and management of the ETFs are definitely the keystone moments of my career," Shill has said. But her trajectory suggests the keystone is still being placed. Managing $24.3 billion at 30 puts her in rarefied territory — few portfolio managers of any age oversee that scale, and even fewer did it by creating products that didn't exist when they started. The under-the-radar dimension is real: Shill works in a corner of finance (CLO ETFs, tokenized funds) that gets less attention than equity hedge funds or venture capital, despite managing more capital than most headline-grabbing fund launches. She has limited public presence beyond her BI Rising Stars feature. What makes Shill's story resonate for this list is the combination of execution and vision. She didn't just manage existing products — she built new ones that changed how entire asset classes are accessed. And she did it from Denver, not Manhattan, at an age when most portfolio managers are still proving themselves on someone else's team.

Details