What are the largest fortunes ever made by INDEPENDENT traders? By independent trader I am talking about someone that only trades their own money. Not someone that manages other people's money. Obviously lots of hedge fund managers and money managers have gotten very rich from trading but they were trading with other people's money. Have any independent traders ever made $100 million, $250 million, half billion or even billion dollar fortunes just trading THEIR OWN money? If so who are these independent traders and what are their stories?
I know one guy that made over $100MM organically with no OPM. He started with $12,000 or so in 1998. I am not going to name him. He's a German national. I would think Rotter is probably the guy with the best story, but not sure how much of his stake was pooled.
Richard Dennis reached about 200 million USD in his personal account. Later he went on to manage OPM, as far as I know - with mixed success.
I didn't read the book The Big Short, but heard a story about two junior investment bankers who quit to start a hedgefund that was self funded. They took 50k and turned it into like 60MM. They did this by picking stocks and then buying LEAPS and tripling or quadrupling their money and doing it over and over again, constantly doubling down. They then were massively short in 2008.
Market wizards is filled in with futures and equities traders, most of whom made at least 10 MM, maybe a few like Dennis 200MM. It also has a couple of traders doing vol via vanilla. But independent traders trading vol via exotics. Wow!! Will you elaborate a bit please ? Did they make this money from good directional calls on volatility/skew expressed via specially structured exotics ? Or they did some kind of model arbitrage to get benefit from mis-pricing of skew/vol/convexity etc. ? If they actually arbed big banks, this story must make for a coverpage on bloomberg markets.
The EU has had retail exotics for over a decade. He started with betonmarkets making >$1MM and then gained access to bank dealing.