Speaker

Paul Tudor Jones

Paul Tudor Jones

Paul Tudor Jones is the founder of Tudor Investment Corporation and one of the most storied macro traders of the modern era, best known for predicting and profiting from the October 1987 stock-market crash.

Jones began on the floor of the commodity pits in 1976, amid raging inflation, and bought a seat on COMEX. The searing early lesson — watching the Hunt brothers’ silver fortune collapse from billions to near-bankruptcy in weeks when the exchange forced liquidation in 1980 — fixed liquidity and risk control at the centre of his method. He founded Tudor in 1980; his flagship BVI fund has run for four decades with a slightly negative correlation to the S&P 500, meaning its returns are essentially pure alpha rather than a bet on rising markets. He has taught an investments class in Virginia every semester since 1982.

Beyond markets, Jones is a major philanthropist. He founded the Robin Hood Foundation — New York’s poverty-fighting charity — the year after the 1987 crash, applying metrics, goals, and business discipline to giving, and later started one of the city’s first charter schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Core positions

Jones is a trend-follower and a trader, not a buy-and-hold investor: his signature lesson is that great fortunes come from riding a single trend for the longest possible time, and his own edge is trading in and out of some twenty-five instruments with ‘exquisite execution’ — buying amid maximum fear, selling into elation. Above all he is a risk manager: he owns nothing he cannot exit, holding that any trader or investor who has truly succeeded is first and foremost a great risk manager. He sets this restless, liquidity-obsessed style explicitly against Warren Buffett’s patient compounding, which he came late to admire without being able to practise. On AI he is a vocal safety hawk, warning of an unregulated tail risk and calling for cross-border regulation and mandatory watermarking. On markets today he reads an over-equitised United States — stock-market cap far above historical norms relative to GDP — as a sovereign debt bubble vulnerable to a supply-driven reversal.

In the wiki