Victor Teicher began his Wall Street career at Goldman Sachs in 1966 after graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He worked there for 14 years, rising to managing director in the risk arbitrage department, where he specialized in merger arbitrage and convertible securities. In 1980, he left Goldman to establish his own hedge fund, Victor Teicher & Co., which grew to manage over $100 million in assets by the mid-1980s. Teicher's career ended amid the major insider trading prosecutions of the 1980s. In 1986, the SEC filed civil charges against him and his firm, alleging he received illegal tips from Ivan Boesky on impending corporate takeovers, including those of Nabisco Brands and Houston Natural Gas. After contesting the charges vigorously—including suing the SEC—Teicher pleaded guilty in September 1989 to two counts of securities fraud. He was sentenced to four months in prison, six months of house arrest, a $1.2 million fine, and ordered to disgorge $1.05 million in profits, and permanently barred from the securities industry.