In this article, we will take as look at five different well-known forex traders.
George Soros
George Soros is one of the most famous forex traders in the world, known simultaneously for his vast-reaching philantrophic endevours through the Open Society Foundations and for being labelled the Man Who Broke The Bank of England.
In October 2023, Soros net worth was estimated at 6.7 billion USD – and this was after him having donated over 32 billion USD to the Open Society Foundations.
George Soros (György Schwartz) was born into a non-religious Jewish family in Budapest in 1930. After having survived through the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, Soros moved to England in 1947. He enrolled at the London School of Economics and was awarded a Master of Science in philosophy in 1954.
In the early part of his career, Soros worked for banks in Great Britian and the United States. Eventually, he formed his own hedgefund Double Eagle in 1969. Profits from this fund was then used to form the Soros Fund Management hedgefund the following year, and Double Eagle changed its name to Quantum Fund. By 2011, Quantum Fund had 25 billion USD under management.
The moniker the Man Who Broke The Bank of England was bestoved upon him in the early 1990s, when Soros shorted the Sterling – a risky maneouver involving shorted GBP eqvivalent to 10 billion USD. Britian’s Black Wednesday Currency Crisis occured on September 16, 1992, and Soros made a 1 billion USD profit.
Joe Lewis
Joseph C. Lewis was born in London in 1937. At the age of 15, he started working in the family business – a catering company in London’s West End. As of 2023, his personal wealth is estimated at circa 5 billions USD.
In the late 1970s, Lewis sold the catering business to devote his time to forex speculation, and in 1992, Lewis joined forces with Soros in his speculation against the Sterling and made an equivalent of 1.8 billion USD.
Lewis keeps a majority of his assets in the investment portfolio Tavistock Group. In October 2022, his ownership of the football club Tottenham Hotspur was transferred to the Lewis Family Trust.
Lewis lives in Bahamas in the Caribbean.
Paul Tudor Jones
Paul Tudor Jones is a hedge fund manager, environmentalist and philanthropist. His Tudor Investment Corporation makes the bulk of their money from interest rate fluctuations on the forex market.
Born in Memphis, USA, in 1954, Jones earned his degree in economics from the University of Virginia in 1976 and started a career in commodity speculation. He founded the hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation in 1980 and his short-selling yielded roughly 100 million USD from the big crash of 1987. The following year, Jones founded the charitable Robin Hood Foundation to combat poverty.
In 1992-1995, Jones was a part of the New York Stock Exchange board of directors.
By April 2022,.his estimated wealth was 7.3 billion USD.
Stanley Druckenmiller
Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller is a philanthropist and former hedge-fund manager whose speculation strategy is similar to Soro’s. In addition to traditional forex speculation, Druckenmiller was also speculating on stocks and utilizing futures.
Druckenmiller was born in Pittsburgh, USA, in 1953 but grew up in Philadelphia. After his parent’s divorce, he moved with his father to New Jersey and later to Richmond, Virginia.
After studying at the Collegiate School in Richmond, Druckenmiller earned a BA in English and economy at Bowdoin College in Main. While at Bowdoin, he ran a hot dog stand with Lawrence B. Lindsey, who would eventually become an influential policy advisor for President George W. Bush.
Druckenmiller left the doctoral program in economics for a jobat Pittsburgh National Bank, where he became an oil analyst. In the early 1980s, he established the fund Druckenmiller Duquense Capital. During many years, he also managed assets for George Soros and was the leading portfolio manager for Quantum Fund. When Duquesne Capital closed in 2010, it had over $12 billion in assets.
As of 2023, Druckenmiller’s personal wealth is estimated at 6.2 billion USD. This is after him having donated over 700 million to medical research and poverty reduction.
Bill Lipschutz
Bill Lipschutz is a forex trader who, among other things, brought in hundreds of millions from forex speculation during his time with the Salomon Brothers in the 1980s.
Born in 1956, Lipschutz grew up In Farmingdale, New York. Math was one of his favourite subjects in school and he was also an avid tennis player.
Lipschutz holds a BA from Cornell University´s Architectural Design program and an MBA in finance from the Johnson School of Management (same university). During his time as a student, he inherited stocks worth $12,000 from an elderly relative and elected to use that as a foundation for further investments. Over time, he made his portfolio grow to almost $250,000. Then, one risky investment choice did not go as planned, and he lost most of it. This became an important lesson for Lipschutz. Later in life, he would advice budding forex traders to focus on their losses, because – in his opinion – it is the losses that will determine how successful you are. According to Lipschutz, the most successful traders are the ones who have managed to figure out how they can make money even though they are only right in 20-30% of the cases.
After his time at Cornell, Lipschutz started working for the Salomn Borthers and became a part of the then newly formed office for forex speculation. In the mid-1980s, Lipschutz was bringing in roughly $300 million a year for the Salomon Brothers.
Lipschutz left the Salomon Brothers in 1990. He founded the Rowayton Capital Management, and then co-founded Hathersage Capital Management with class mates from Cornell. Hathersage manages assets for a very small and very select group of investors.