This guy can do whatever he wants for the rest of his life. eat lobster for breakfast in paris and fly his private jet to anywhere in the world for lunch. this is exactly what trading is all about. making money so you don't have to work, ever, if you don't want to. he wins. to debate anything else is plain silly. he won't care what you say as he shops for planets on his private continent.
The thing is he had good trading numbers at Enron. So when he went on his own then the good name at Enron brought him mega clients. In first year $500M must have been taken in easy. Then these being hedge funds, they are able to place big macro bets like 20% position on say oil or gas or gold. Rest is the matter of another good quarter and another billion to play with. After say $200M in personal account, these guys start to play options and derivatives. Call a bank in Austria and place a straight put option on NG for say $30M. If it proves right, then Austrian bank is drained and you are floating in bucks.
If I knew it was that easy I would have done it just as you describe. I thought that it took real talent to make that kind of money. Are you totally out of your mind describing this type of accomplishment as if the guy just did this and then he just did that and of course he made a few billion? Get a grip man!
I just laugh about a 5 minute bar. It reminds me of the time one of my systems on Wealth Lab had a 17,500% return and 720% APR, and it was publicly available. Using a system with similar returns I see a monte carlo simulation just as high as my APR backtests that system had, and now instead of 17,500% total I might look at backtests multiples of that. Bet that was how he did it, too. Building models with mountains of data that nobody else has. I know the feeling after you've worked for a few years to see something come to fruition, so I sympathize with him, but what better way to have fun in life than moving the market as much as he could just to screw people who might have been trading 10 contracts against you and drop a 5000 lot position in their face before pushing the market to within 3 ticks of your target before putting a stop 5 ticks above that level and pegging the market as you watch the cretins move it below your short target. Just makes me grateful to know I have models that'll scale into the billions.
a bit of jelaousy here and there he did well ! although most likely way to do it, to have NG regulators and other insiders as part of your hedge fund. Seem to be standard these days position sizes he had, would be noticed and worked against him without helpful hand.
"Are you totally out of your mind describing this type of accomplishment as if the guy just did this and then he just did that and of course he made a few billion? Get a grip man!" Trust me, few big macro bets is all it takes to strike it real big if you have a good base like $100M. Why does Warren Buffet not invest in more than a few stocks. How did George Soros made billions by shorting dollar or some other currency. How come during internet boom, there were lots of millionaires popping up despite the fact they did not even pay 10 minutes a day to stock markets.........because there 401Ks bought one or two stocks that became 10 bagger hotties. I am not watering down Mr. Arnold's genius or success, not even for half a second!
This is definitely one of the greatest trading runs of all time. Did great at a firm, then by himself, played an inefficient Market well on huge size, busted out his biggest competitor, then retired while massively ahead of the game. I am curious what he does next. I bet he gets bored eventually and comes back to the markets. Sitting on cash gets boring after a while, and the lure of competing will return IMO.
Funny you mentioned NG because I just looked at the quote a moment before I read your post. Down 8.5% today. Pretty fugly for some big hedge fund titans who own millions of shares. I remember reading a while back how John Arnold did well taking the opposite position of Amaranth's Brian Hunter, who lost $6.5 billion on natural gas futures.