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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jones is married to Sonia Jones, a yoga teacher and wellness entrepreneur who founded Gaia and Mind Body Green (as an investor). They have four children.

His philanthropic work is substantial: the Robin Hood Foundation has become one of the most impactful poverty-focused organizations in New York, known for its rigorous measurement of grant effectiveness. He also funds conservation in Africa through the Paul Tudor Jones II Foundation.

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.

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