George Soros

Soros doesn't use a fixed strategy. He uses a theory.

He calls it reflexivity — the idea that market participants don't just react to fundamentals, they influence them. House prices going up makes people confident.

Confident people borrow more. Borrowing pushes prices higher.

Until it doesn't. Markets create self-reinforcing loops that diverge from reality for a long time before snapping back.

In practice, this meant making very large macro bets — currencies, interest rates, commodities, whole stock markets — when he believed a loop had gone too far. He didn't diversify to reduce risk.

He concentrated into high-conviction positions and used leverage. He famously said: "It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong."

Paul Tudor Jones

Jones is a global macro trader with a strong technical overlay. He looks for major macro trends — interest rate cycles, currency moves, commodity supercycles — and positions for them using futures and options across multiple asset classes.

He is also heavily influenced by technical analysis: he uses Elliott Wave theory and studies historical market patterns to time entries and exits. He is not a value investor in any sense.

He does not care much what a company is fundamentally worth. He cares about momentum, sentiment, and positioning.

George Soros

He believes in fallibility — specifically, that every market participant is operating on imperfect information, including himself. His approach: form a hypothesis, bet on it, watch for signals that the hypothesis is wrong, and change course decisively when those signals arrive.

He is explicitly anti-certainty. He thinks the most dangerous investor is the one who mistakes confidence for competence.

His philosophy of the open society — the political version — applies equally to markets: no position is so right that it can't be challenged.

Paul Tudor Jones

Jones believes that markets move in cycles and that those cycles have technical signatures that repeat because human behavior repeats. He has said that the most important thing in trading is not being right — it is losing the minimum amount when you are wrong.

His 5:1 risk/reward rule — only take a trade if you think you can make five times what you risk — is widely cited. He is also a believer in global macro as the purest expression of investment thinking: you are betting on the direction of entire economies, not individual companies.

George Soros

He had an unusual relationship with physical discomfort as a risk signal. He's talked about trusting his back pain — when a position was going wrong, he'd feel it before he saw it in the numbers.

That's either profound intuition or a good story. Either way, he wasn't a systematic rule-follower.

He made enormous bets and reversed course on short notice when the thesis broke. His risk management wasn't "don't lose money." It was "don't lose so much that you can't play again."

Paul Tudor Jones

Jones is famous for a single risk management rule: never risk more than 1% of your portfolio on any one trade. He has described this as the most important rule in trading.

The mathematical implication is that you need to be catastrophically wrong many times in a row before the fund is seriously damaged. He also cuts losing positions immediately.

He has said that he would rather miss a move than hold a losing position. The 1987 short was the exception that proved the rule — he sized it heavily because his conviction was unusually high.

George Soros

He lives in New York and his estate in the Hamptons. He donated over $32 billion — more than 80% of his peak wealth — to the Open Society Foundations.

He's been married three times; his third wife Tamiko Bolton is 42 years younger than him. He plays tennis.

He's in his mid-90s and still occasionally publishes essays on markets and geopolitics. He handed chairmanship of the Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander in 2023.

Paul Tudor Jones

Jones lives primarily in Greenwich, Connecticut and Palm Beach. He is a serious conservationist and owns significant land in Tanzania, where he runs conservation programs.

He founded the Robin Hood Foundation in 1988, which has raised over $4 billion to fight poverty in New York City. He is a major donor to the University of Virginia, where a building bears his name.

He does not live extravagantly by hedge fund standards — his philanthropy is where the money goes.

George Soros

September 16, 1992. Black Wednesday.

Soros had been building a short position against the British pound for months. Britain was in the Exchange Rate Mechanism — a system that required it to keep the pound within a fixed band against other European currencies.

He believed the pound was overvalued and Britain couldn't sustain the interest rates needed to defend it. He was right.

The Bank of England spent billions trying to hold the peg. It failed.

Britain withdrew from the ERM. Soros made approximately $1 billion that day.

Total profits in the surrounding weeks were closer to $2 billion. He became known as the man who broke the Bank of England.

Paul Tudor Jones

The 1987 Black Monday trade defines his career. Jones had studied historical market patterns and become convinced that the US stock market was behaving similarly to 1929.

He shorted the market aggressively through futures. On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones fell 22.6% in a single session.

Tudor's BVI Global Fund returned approximately 200% for the year. He personally made around $100 million.

The trade was captured in a PBS documentary called "Trader" filmed earlier that year — footage that shows him predicting the crash almost to the day. He later asked for the documentary to be suppressed, believing it gave away too much about how he thought.

That request made it more famous.

George Soros

2000. Soros had been warning about the dot-com bubble for years.

He was right about it being a bubble. But he kept buying tech stocks because he thought the momentum would continue a little longer.

It didn't. The Quantum Fund lost $3 billion in a matter of months.

He later said: "I was too early and then I panicked." That's a remarkable thing for someone of his stature to say. The lesson: being right about the direction of a trade doesn't mean you're right about the timing.

Paul Tudor Jones

The 2000s were difficult. Tudor's returns declined significantly as macro trends became less clean and trading became more crowded with quantitative competitors.

The fund has returned roughly 3% annualized in the 2010s — a steep drop from its historical average. Jones has attributed this partly to central bank distortion of markets and partly to the structural changes in how macro trends develop when central banks intervene constantly.

He has been relatively candid that the macro environment of the last decade has been his least productive.

George Soros

George Soros was born György Schwartz in Budapest in 1930. His family survived the Nazi occupation by obtaining forged papers and hiding.

He saw up close what happens when governments go bad. He fled Hungary after the war, worked as a railway porter and waiter in London, and studied philosophy at the London School of Economics — where he became a student of Karl Popper, whose big idea was that open societies are better than closed ones.

That stuck.

He moved to New York in 1956 and spent the next decade working at brokerages and learning the markets. In 1973 he co-founded the Quantum Fund with Jim Rogers.

From 1970 to 2000, the fund averaged roughly 30% annual returns. That's the second-best sustained hedge fund record in history, behind only Jim Simons.

He stepped back from active management gradually through the 2000s and has spent most of his time on philanthropy ever since.

Paul Tudor Jones

Jones grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, in a comfortable family and attended the University of Virginia, where he studied economics. After graduating in 1976 he cold-called commodity trader Eli Tullis in New Orleans, worked for him briefly, then moved to New York and got a job as a commodities broker at E.F.

Hutton. He was a natural.

By 1980 he had connected with cotton trader William Dunavant, one of the largest cotton merchants in the world, who gave him capital to trade.

In 1980 he founded Tudor Investment Corporation with a small amount of seed money. The early years were cotton and commodities — he was a floor trader turned fund manager.

Then came the macro: he began studying market cycles, Elliott Wave theory, and the technical patterns that preceded major market crashes. By October 1987, he was positioned short.

The Dow fell 22.6% on October 19, 1987 — still the largest single-day percentage decline in US stock market history. Tudor's fund tripled that year.

George Soros

Soros Fund Management is the vehicle. The Quantum Fund, which ran under it, returned roughly 30% annually for three decades.

The 1992 trade — shorting £10 billion of British sterling — was the most famous single day in hedge fund history, but the 30-year sustained record is the real story.

He stepped down from managing outside money in 2011 and converted to a family office. He's donated over $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, which funds democracy and civil society programs in over 120 countries.

That's more money than he kept for himself.

Paul Tudor Jones

Tudor Investment Corp, founded in 1980, is his flagship firm managing approximately $12 billion. It runs global macro strategies across equities, fixed income, currencies, and commodities.

The fund has averaged approximately 19% annual net returns since inception — extraordinary over four decades — though returns in recent years have been more modest as macro trading has become more crowded and central bank intervention has made trends harder to read.

He also founded Just Capital, a nonprofit that ranks American corporations on their treatment of workers, communities, and the environment — and has made this work a second career alongside trading. He sits on the boards of multiple institutions and is a substantial donor to education and conservation causes.

George Soros

London School of Economics, BSc and MSc in Philosophy, 1952. Student of Karl Popper.

He's credited Popper's concept of the open society as the foundation of both his philanthropic work and his investment theory.

Paul Tudor Jones

University of Virginia, BA in Economics, 1976. He has donated extensively to UVA — the Paul Tudor Jones Commons is named in his honor.

He has also credited his early mentor Eli Tullis as more formative than any formal education — Tullis taught him discipline and the emotional demands of trading.