May 2008 – Working on the noisy, frenetic trading desk at Goldman, Sachs & Co.’s London offices on Fleet Street earlier this decade, Kieran Prior and John Yeatts, two bright and ambitious 20-somethings from very different worlds, became close friends. Prior, a gregarious, wisecracking proprietary trader from the gritty outer suburbs of Manchester, took a liking to the soft-spoken Yeatts, a first-year financial analyst and native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Though Prior, then 23, was just a year older than Yeatts when they met in 2002, he enjoyed dispensing practical advice, teasing the American about his Saturday night dates and taking him out for pints of beer after work.

Yeatts returned the favor. When traders ordered lunch delivered to their desks, Yeatts cut up Prior’s food and fed him one small bite at a time. When Prior wanted a coffee, Yeatts would hunt down a straw, pop it into a lukewarm latté and carefully hold it close so that Prior could take a sip. If Prior accidentally knocked research materials off his desk, Yeatts gathered them up and replaced them, because Prior – who was born with a rare condition akin to cerebral palsy that affects his motor skills and impairs his speech – cannot get out of his electrically powered wheelchair unaided, and has never been able to walk.

Indeed, Prior struggles with even the most basic motor skills. When startled by any sudden movement or loud noise at close range, he reacts abruptly, muscles contracting sharply, limbs flying out in a reflexive response. Stress and fatigue, the daily burdens of any trader, exacerbate Prior’s symptoms, making it hard for him to control his hands and feet – and even harder for him to talk: Enunciating requires sustained concentration on his part. Prior grows embarrassed and deeply apologetic when he not infrequently kicks a colleague by accident on the trading floor, but the most serious damage he has ever done is to himself: The force of his reflexes is so great that he sometimes dislocates his own shoulders.

Yet despite these physical limitations, Prior is thriving on Goldman’s proprietary trading desk – arguably the most demanding and competitive testing ground in finance – winning the respect and admiration of colleagues while gaining experience, confidence and increased responsibility. It’s not easy running a book of any size for the high-powered trading machine that supplies much of the earnings of Wall Street’s most profitable and envied firm. That Prior is able to do so encumbered by such physical limitations is nothing short of extraordinary. Gary Williams, the former head of European equity trading who hired Prior nearly eight years ago, has enormous respect for his sheer determination to learn the markets.

“He’s an exceptionally smart, perceptive guy who has purposefully risen to – and overcome – so many challenges,” says Williams. “While the noise and hurly-burly of the trading floor make the physicality of trading more difficult for someone in Kieran’s position, the challenge actually appeals to him.”

Intellectually, Prior, now 29, has few limits. Since joining Goldman as a financial analyst in the equity division on July 10, 2000, Prior – whose IQ score of 238 on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale puts him in the top 1 percent of 1 percent of the world’s population – has risen from performing basic research analysis and trading Euro Stoxx futures to running a $50 million value-based book of European mid- and large-cap equities and derivatives.

That climb has been all the more difficult because Prior couldn’t learn like any other junior trader. His bosses at Goldman quickly understood that although he could use a phone headset and Bloomberg terminal like others, Prior would never have the manual dexterity to handle high-volume client-order flow. So rather than have him spend several years filling orders as most young traders do, they matched him with a small group of more senior prop traders in risk arbitrage. Working alongside them, Prior learned by example, helping out with research and booking trades for the team. Finally, a few years ago, he earned the chance to run his own book.

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© 2009 Institutional Investor, Inc.