John Hecht is a Managing Director and senior research analyst covering the specialty finance and commercial banking industries.

Prior to joining JMP, John spent two years in portfolio management as an analyst at HAL Investments, a private equity fund, and served as director of corporate development for two years at Riverstone Networks, a network technology company. Before starting business school in 1998, John worked in investment banking at Montgomery Securities, assisting specialty and consumer finance companies from 1995 through 1997. John also spent two years in the investment banking group at Merrill Lynch, providing corporate finance and mergers and acquisition services to large banks, regional thrifts and specialty finance companies.

In 2009, StarMine ranked John second in the Consumer Finance category for estimate accuracy and third in the category for stock picking. In 2007, John was ranked third among all stock pickers in the Consumer & Specialty Finance category in the annual "Best on the Street" analyst survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal.

John holds an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford and a BA in international economics from the University of California, Berkeley.