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Trader Monthly 100: The Top 10
The highest-earning traders of 2005.
By: Rich Blake , A.D. Barber , Robert LaFranco
Issue: April/May 2006 , Page 69
The Top 10
The Top Hedge-Fund Traders
The Top Wall Street Traders
The Best of the Rest
The Top Up-and-Comers
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RANK: 1
T. Boone Pickens
CITY: Dallas
FIRM: BP Capital
AGE: 77
“Long crude” doesn’t even begin to describe T. Boone Pickens’s position. With $5 billion and growing in assets under management, his fund company, BP Capital, is throwing off a small national economy via an unshakable bet that the world’s oil supply can’t keep up with rising demand.
“Yes, my own money is in there,” Pickens told Trader Monthly in January, describing his operation. “That always impresses the other investors.”
And what’s not to be impressed with? Returns on Pickens’s main commodities pool were over 700 percent in 2005. His smaller equity fund was up more than 100 percent. While Pickens may not be heavily involved in trading on a day-to-day basis (the funds overall actually trade very little), his market view — and oft-televised table thumping — is what has driven BP’s long-term strategy since oil was $20 a barrel.
When he’s not out hyping the possibility of triple-digit crude prices or helping sink Democratic presidential hopefuls, Pickens donates money to pet rescue. Recently, he caught some flak when, as part of a tax loophole, he gave $165 million to Oklahoma State and the money ended up in his hedge fund. It’s not a bad place to park a pile of dough, of course: Triple-digit returns off a 10-digit asset base that includes an oversized dose of his own money translates into what Trader Monthly believes is the largest one-year sum ever earned (in contrast to a Bill Gates–style appreciation in net worth), larger even than Michael Milken’s legendary $550 million haul of 1986, adjusted for inflation.
ESTIMATED INCOME: $1.5 BILLION+
RANK: 2
Stevie Cohen
CITY: Stamford, Connecticut
FIRM: SAC Capital Advisors
AGE: 49
The man is called “Stevie,” as if he were everybody’s favorite soul singer or the neighborhood paperboy, yet he could very well be the richest trader who ever laid down a position. Either way, Cohen is certainly among the most admired living financial figures, second only perhaps to Alan Greenspan (who might end up working for Cohen, at the rate Cohen gobbles up market studs). Says one former SAC staffer: “Stevie has the most clout on the Street, the best contacts, an army of analysts and unlimited capital.” A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who got started in the late 1970s as a proprietary trader at Gruntal & Co., Cohen launched SAC in 1992 with $20 million. He has since amassed more than $7 billion that he personally runs — not to mention 500 or so traders, analysts and support staff, creating an asset-management empire that spans two management companies (SAC Capital Advisors and SAC Capital Management), three main funds (SAC Capital Associates, SAC Capital International and SAC Global Diversified), two separate offices in Stamford and additional outposts in Manhattan, London and San Francisco. When Cohen comes upon a trader with exceptional skills, he’ll seed him in-house — or help put him in business on his own.
The SAC family had another impressive year in 2005 — performance, for the most part, was 20 percent–plus, as it has been, amazingly, just about every year since Cohen began. With his incentive fee of up to 50 percent of total profits (though his newest fund, the SAC Multi-Strategy, is said to be 3-and-35, and we hear the rest of his vehicles going forward will follow suit), perhaps only a federal mint prints more money year in, year out than Cohen. Had it not been for an anomalous rough patch this past October (his only down month), his epic compensation amount might have been even greater. We figure the SAC empire took in revenues of at least $3 billion last year — and if Cohen, conservatively, took one-third…
ESTIMATED INCOME: $1 BILLION+
RANK: 3
James Simons
CITY: East Setauket, New York
FIRM: Renaissance Technologies Corp.
AGE: 67
Jim Simons is a Euclid for our times: He has a Ph.D. in math from Berkeley, has won the prestigious Veblen Prize in geometry, taught at MIT and founded Math for America. Well, here are some numbers: $6 billion, as in Simon’s assets under management at year end. Or how about 5-and-44, his notoriously stiff fee arrangement? Then, of course, there’s $100 billion, the lofty target Simons has set for a net-long vehicle his firm recently started. Finally, there’s the 28 percent return produced by his Medallion fund, which employs scientific models to predict price movements in commodities, currencies and equities.
“Certain price patterns are non-random,” the former code-breaker cryptically told The New York Times in a rare interview last November. He could be on to something: After all, Medallion has averaged more than 30 percent, net of fees, every year over the past decade and a half — or three times as much as the S&P 500 index over the same period.
Simons’s hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations support everything from autism research to augmenting inner-city math teachers’ salaries to atom-smashing Big Bang replication experiments at the Brookhaven National Lab.
ESTIMATED INCOME: $900 MILLION – $1 BILLION
RANK: 4
Paul Tudor Jones
CITY: Greenwich, Connecticut
FIRM: Tudor Investment Corp.
AGE: 51
As the long, hot summer of 2005 wore on, the flagship fund that anchors Paul Tudor Jones’s roughly $14 billion hedge-fund empire was hardly sizzling. Reports were surfacing that like a lot of funds, it had suffered losses in May and — gasp! — was actually down 2 percent at mid-year. But never bet against a master. Jones staged a comeback, all right: His flagship fund (with assets of $2 billion) finished the year up roughly 14 percent, an improvement over the 12 percent return registered a year earlier.
Much of this commodities superstar’s personal earnings have been plowed back into his funds over the years; thus it’s astounding to speculate what he might actually be taking home. We attempted to err on the conservative side, because Jones has a reputation for paying his people extremely well. But, based on what we believe is at least a sizable personal stake, Jones’s 2005 take had to be among his most enormous yet — which is why he was able to do such things as back Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s new media group, swap thousands of acres of pristine Colorado land with the federal government and help bankroll construction of a new 15,000-seat arena for the University of Virginia, his alma mater. It’ll be called John Paul Jones Arena — named after Jones’s father, by the way, not the Revolutionary War naval hero.
ESTIMATED INCOME: $800 – $900 MILLION
