Pay falls at fund star’s UK offices
SALARIES have tumbled at the London branch of the hedge fund run by Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire trader who earned cult status by predicting 1987’s Black Monday crash.
Tudor Jones, who is worth an estimated $3.2bn (£2.2bn) after three decades at the top of one of the world’s most successful investment companies, is renowned for providing his employees with lavish pay deals. Around 100 staff at the European offshoot of his firm shared $151.3m in wages for the year ending 31 December 2008, after Tudor Capital’s funds proved resilient to the meltdown in global banking sectors.
But salaries plunged by nearly half last year, with traders at Tudor Capital’s Surrey office splitting $77m, according to accounts. Revenues from performance and management fees fell by a similar amount even though equity markets around the world perked up on the back of huge fiscal stimulus packages.
Tudor Jones began his career trading cotton for a merchant firm before launching his first hedge fund near New York in 1983. He shot to Wall Street’s attention four years later when he tripled his money by heavily shorting equities during the Black Monday stockmarket collapse.
Explaining his style in an interview in 2008, he said: “I love trading macro [based on economic patterns]. If trading is like chess, then macro is like three-dimensional chess.”