Paul Tudor Jones, chief executive officer of Tudor Investment Corp., and his wife Sonia Jones attend the Robin Hood Foundation gala in New York, U.S., on Monday, May 9, 2011. Wall Street’s largest single-evening fundraising event had Lady Gaga onstage and took in $47.4 million at its annual New York dinner.
Paul Tudor Jones Macro and Stock Views
- Commodities Will Be in a Bear Market Until At Least 2020
- By 2030, the USA will reach Greece Debt Levels
- China is in gigantic credit bubble
- Japanese bonds are also in bubble but who knows when it will burst
- Long USDJPY, as Japan needs inflation and must devalue the yen
as of October 2014 / These Views Are Taken From Public Sources and Are Edited by OctaFinance Staff
Paul Tudor Jones is one of the most successful traders of the 20th century. In his trading career, Jones focused on trading any asset class.
He is the founder of Tudor Investment Corporation-an asset management company and hedge fund. In 2014, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth to be approximately US$4.3 billion. The magazine also ranked him as the 108th richest American and 345th richest man in the world. He is also the founder of the successful Robin Hood Foundation.
Early Beginnings
Paul Tudor Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee on September 28, 1954. As a young man, he attended an all-boys elementary school- Presbyterian Day School, before attending Memphis University School for high school.
He then joined University of Virginia, acquiring an undergraduate degree in economics in 1976. That same year he also won the college’s welterweight boxing championship. During his time at University of Virginia, Jones was the president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Paul Jones married Australian-born, New York-based yoga entrepreneur Sonia Klein in 1988. Today they have four children Caroline, Dorothy, Chrissy and Jack.
Professional Career
Paul Jones started from early beginnings. He was a clerk on trading floors at E.F & Co Hutton in 1976, before becoming a broker for the same company. In 1980, he decided to branch out and start his own business. He did well for about two and half years before he decided to go back to school and get more knowledge about the business.
Although he applied and was accepted, Jones decided against it at last minute knowing too well that there was nothing he will learn in business school that he did not know already.
Instead he accepted a suggestion from his cousin, William Dunavant, Jr., whose Dunavant Enterprises is one of the largest cotton merchants in the world, to go down to New Orleans to work with commodity broker Eli Tullis. Jones did just that and was hired and mentored by Eli Tullis in trading cotton futures at the New York Cotton Exchange.
Jones says he learnt a lot from Tullis including the important lesson that in he needed a backbone to deal with the emotional ups and downs if he was to succeed in the trading industry.
Accomplishments
As of June 1, 2007 Paul Jones firm Tudor group was estimated to be managing $17.7 billion in assets. Their broad and diverse investment strategies include global macro trading, fundamental equity investing in the U.S. and Europe, emerging markets, venture capital, commodities, event-driven strategies, and technical trading systems.
Jones, with his colleague Hunt Taylor, was instrumental in the creation of FINEX, the financial futures division of the New York Board of Trade, and in the development of the U.S. dollar index futures contract that trades there. He also served as chairman of the New York Cotton Exchange from August 1992 through June 1995.
Previously Paul Jones served as a director of the Futures Industry Association. He was instrumental in creation and development of an education-arm for the association—which has since been renamed as the Institute for Financial Markets based in Washington D.C. Jones advocated and was behind the design and implementation of the First ethics training course for future exchanges. This became the standard for all futures exchanges in the United States.
In 1987 Jones predicted the Black Monday! This turned out to be one of his earliest and major successes as his money was tripled due to his strategy to leverage even large short positions in trading. The Tudor Investment Corporation investment strategies include discretionary global macro, quantitative equity market neutral, quantitative global macro and growth equity discretionary equity long/short.
Tudor Investment Corporation
In 1980, Jones decided to go solo again and founded the Tudor Investment Corporation. Today this company is one of the leading asset management firms in the United States with its headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Tudor Investment Corporation is one of the companies under the umbrella of The Tudor Group. The firm is involved in active trading, research and investing in assets such as currencies, commodities classes, equities and related derivative for an international clientele.
Investment Strategy
His famous trading styles reported by Market Wizards magazine and the press are quoted below;
Jones considers himself a premier market opportunist. When he develops a strategy, he pursues it from a very-low-risk standpoint until it proves him wrong or until he decides to take a different approach.
• The best money is made at the market turns. It may have missed a lot of meat in the middle, but catches a lot of tops and bottoms.
• Jones spends much of his day making himself happy and relaxed.
• “It is better to get out of a losing position, always play defense not offense.”
• Jones decreases his trading size when he is doing poorly and increases when trades pick up.
• Jones uses mental stops. If it hits that number, he is out no matter what.
• He monitors the whole portfolio equity (risk) in real-time.
• He prioritizes prices over fundamentals.
• He doesn’t care for past mistakes, instead strategizes on what he s gong to do next.
• “Don’t be a hero. Don’t have an ego. Always question yourself and your ability.”
Philanthropy
Paul Jones founded the Robin Hood Foundation- a philanthropic organization supported by hedge fund operators that contributes to charities around the world. He also the first all-boys charter boys in the US –The Excellence charter school located in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In addition, he also founded and chaired the Bedford Stuyvesant I Have a Dream Foundation, which sponsors local students in colleges.
Paul Jones owns Grumeti Reserves in Tanzania’s Western Serengeti. He was praised by the African Great Lakes country’s Parliament for not permitting wildlife hunting in his reserve. The Sasaskwa, a hotel in the reserve was in 2011 and 2012 named the #1 hotel in the world by Travel & Leisure Magazine.
He has been looking to upscale Africa and its neighborhoods by working with London architectural firm Hart Howerton to develop large scale regional plans for sustainable use of land in Tanzania by local communities. He has also set up a trust for Pamushana a private reserve in 300 miles near Harare on the Zimbabwe –Mozambique border.
He is known for making huge donations to his alma mater, the University of Virginia. He donated $35 million to the construction of a new basketball arena, named the John Paul Jones Arena, in honor of his father who had also attended the University of Virginia. In April 2012, Jones and his wife contributed $12 million towards the creation of a new Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia.
At the 2014 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit, Paul Jones was invited to moderate the education panel which brought prominent labor leaders and reformers in education .Among those present at the forum were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
The team brainstormed on ideas of how to improve schools in the United States. Also on the table was a discussion on how to generate $225 trillion to U.S. GDP over the next 80 years. Forbes Magazine’s December 2014 Philanthropy issue features all these discussions and detailed contribution by participants.
Paul Tudor Jones is a former chairman of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation-a wildlife protection fund and has in the past chaired the Everglades Foundation.
Political Links
Paul Jones considers himself as politically independent. He has donated money to numerous Democratic and Republican candidates over the years. In 2012 he donated $200,000 to Mitt Romney’s election campaign. During the 2008 Presidential Election, Jones was responsible for hoisting a 500-person fundraiser at his Greenwich home the now sitting US Barrack Obama. He has also donated to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaigns.