# Who is the greatest trader of all time?



## Realist (13 June 2006)

Out of interest, who is the Warren Buffett of the trading world, or the Ben Graham of trading?

Who is it?    

What about of Aussie trading?


What is their greatest win or achievement - ie the Gillete or Coke or Geico of their career?


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## Realist (13 June 2006)

Are there any good traders?


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## ctp6360 (13 June 2006)

Its sure as hell not me! I would have been better to go on holidays all year instead of buy shares, bloody hell!


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## swingstar (13 June 2006)

Read Market Wizards. My personal favourites are Marty Schwarz, Ed Seykota, and Tom Basso.

There's plenty of skilled traders around. I personally know a few who do much better than any buy-and-hope investors I know.


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## suhm (13 June 2006)

i think realist is asking if there is a trader who has been seriously succesful over the long term trading achieving long term results like graham got about 17% pa after he nearly went brankrupt, and buffets 20+% return over the years, although his results over the last few years hasnt been that good, though with all that cash its quite hard to outperform.
Probably also with the capital reinvested because its fairly doable to outperform with small amounts of money and over the short term, hence why we're all on this forum.
Not just some random people who can make even a couple of million a year.


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## Realist (13 June 2006)

> I personally know a few who do much better than any buy-and-hope investors I know.




Hahaha.      

It was a serious question, I really think Ben Graham was a genius, his investment principles are brilliant.  

Who is the trading equivalent? - I'd like to learn from them as I have from Graham.


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## swingstar (13 June 2006)

Definitely recommend you read Market Wizards. Everyone should read it, not just short-term traders. Marty Schwartz has a book called Pit Bull, although he's retired now afaik. 

I don't know of any traders with Buffet's stature and wealth. I know of plenty who live a wealthy lifestyle though.


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## Realist (13 June 2006)

Hmm thanks.

What other books have you read? The only one I read was Darryl Guppy's - and I did not think it was that great.

I bought some other trading book from some guy in Tassie today, and will read some tonite.

I may be converted overnight.    


How did you start out Swingstar - which tools do you use to trade?


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## cuttlefish (13 June 2006)

Ben Graham - he followed a system with clear metrics for his entries and exits - so surely he was a trader as well as an investor.


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## Staybaker (13 June 2006)

George Soros, maybe? Some details here.


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## Realist (13 June 2006)

> Ben Graham - he followed a system with clear metrics for his entries and exits - so surely he was a trader as well as an investor.




 


Certainly not. 

That is like calling the Pope a Muslim.    :swear:


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## bowser (13 June 2006)

Staybaker said:
			
		

> George Soros, maybe? Some details here.




Soros is my pick as well. The fortune he made going short on the GBP is a classic. Wasn't just a one off either.


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## TheAnalyst (13 June 2006)

Not bragging but I am very fast heading there.....


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## lesm (13 June 2006)

Part 1

http://www.traderdaily.com/magazine/article/2598.html

Registrations is free to the site above. The list below from the article may be of interest.

Here is first part of the article for those who do not have a sign-in:

Trader Monthly 100: The Top 10

The highest-earning traders of 2005.
By: Rich Blake , A.D. Barber , Robert LaFranco
Issue: April/May 2006 , Page 69
The Top 10
The Top Hedge-Fund Traders
The Top Wall Street Traders
The Best of the Rest
The Top Up-and-Comers

T100button1

RANK: 1
T. Boone Pickens

CITY: Dallas 
FIRM: BP Capital
AGE: 77

"Long crude" doesn't even begin to describe T. Boone Pickens's position. With $5 billion and growing in assets under management, his fund company, BP Capital, is throwing off a small national economy via an unshakable bet that the world's oil supply can't keep up with rising demand.

"Yes, my own money is in there," Pickens told Trader Monthly in January, describing his operation. "That always impresses the other investors."

And what's not to be impressed with? Returns on Pickens's main commodities pool were over 700 percent in 2005. His smaller equity fund was up more than 100 percent. While Pickens may not be heavily involved in trading on a day-to-day basis (the funds overall actually trade very little), his market view -- and oft-televised table thumping -- is what has driven BP's long-term strategy since oil was $20 a barrel.

When he's not out hyping the possibility of triple-digit crude prices or helping sink Democratic presidential hopefuls, Pickens donates money to pet rescue. Recently, he caught some flak when, as part of a tax loophole, he gave $165 million to Oklahoma State and the money ended up in his hedge fund. It's not a bad place to park a pile of dough, of course: Triple-digit returns off a 10-digit asset base that includes an oversized dose of his own money translates into what Trader Monthly believes is the largest one-year sum ever earned (in contrast to a Bill Gates–style appreciation in net worth), larger even than Michael Milken's legendary $550 million haul of 1986, adjusted for inflation.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $1.5 BILLION+

RANK: 2
Stevie Cohen

CITY: Stamford, Connecticut
FIRM: SAC Capital Advisors
AGE: 49

The man is called "Stevie," as if he were everybody's favorite soul singer or the neighborhood paperboy, yet he could very well be the richest trader who ever laid down a position. Either way, Cohen is certainly among the most admired living financial figures, second only perhaps to Alan Greenspan (who might end up working for Cohen, at the rate Cohen gobbles up market studs). Says one former SAC staffer: "Stevie has the most clout on the Street, the best contacts, an army of analysts and unlimited capital." A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who got started in the late 1970s as a proprietary trader at Gruntal & Co., Cohen launched SAC in 1992 with $20 million. He has since amassed more than $7 billion that he personally runs -- not to mention 500 or so traders, analysts and support staff, creating an asset-management empire that spans two management companies (SAC Capital Advisors and SAC Capital Management), three main funds (SAC Capital Associates, SAC Capital International and SAC Global Diversified), two separate offices in Stamford and additional outposts in Manhattan, London and San Francisco. When Cohen comes upon a trader with exceptional skills, he'll seed him in-house -- or help put him in business on his own.

The SAC family had another impressive year in 2005 -- performance, for the most part, was 20 percent–plus, as it has been, amazingly, just about every year since Cohen began. With his incentive fee of up to 50 percent of total profits (though his newest fund, the SAC Multi-Strategy, is said to be 3-and-35, and we hear the rest of his vehicles going forward will follow suit), perhaps only a federal mint prints more money year in, year out than Cohen. Had it not been for an anomalous rough patch this past October (his only down month), his epic compensation amount might have been even greater. We figure the SAC empire took in revenues of at least $3 billion last year -- and if Cohen, conservatively, took one-third...

ESTIMATED INCOME: $1 BILLION+

RANK: 3
James Simons

CITY: East Setauket, New York
FIRM: Renaissance Technologies Corp.
AGE: 67

Jim Simons is a Euclid for our times: He has a Ph.D. in math from Berkeley, has won the prestigious Veblen Prize in geometry, taught at MIT and founded Math for America. Well, here are some numbers: $6 billion, as in Simon's assets under management at year end. Or how about 5-and-44, his notoriously stiff fee arrangement? Then, of course, there's $100 billion, the lofty target Simons has set for a net-long vehicle his firm recently started. Finally, there's the 28 percent return produced by his Medallion fund, which employs scientific models to predict price movements in commodities, currencies and equities.

"Certain price patterns are non-random," the former code-breaker cryptically told The New York Times in a rare interview last November. He could be on to something: After all, Medallion has averaged more than 30 percent, net of fees, every year over the past decade and a half -- or three times as much as the S&P 500 index over the same period.

Simons's hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations support everything from autism research to augmenting inner-city math teachers' salaries to atom-smashing Big Bang replication experiments at the Brookhaven National Lab.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $900 MILLION – $1 BILLION

RANK: 4
Paul Tudor Jones

CITY: Greenwich, Connecticut
FIRM: Tudor Investment Corp.
AGE: 51

As the long, hot summer of 2005 wore on, the flagship fund that anchors Paul Tudor Jones's roughly $14 billion hedge-fund empire was hardly sizzling. Reports were surfacing that like a lot of funds, it had suffered losses in May and -- gasp! -- was actually down 2 percent at mid-year. But never bet against a master. Jones staged a comeback, all right: His flagship fund (with assets of $2 billion) finished the year up roughly 14 percent, an improvement over the 12 percent return registered a year earlier.

Much of this commodities superstar's personal earnings have been plowed back into his funds over the years; thus it's astounding to speculate what he might actually be taking home. We attempted to err on the conservative side, because Jones has a reputation for paying his people extremely well. But, based on what we believe is at least a sizable personal stake, Jones's 2005 take had to be among his most enormous yet -- which is why he was able to do such things as back Harvey and Bob Weinstein's new media group, swap thousands of acres of pristine Colorado land with the federal government and help bankroll construction of a new 15,000-seat arena for the University of Virginia, his alma mater. It'll be called John Paul Jones Arena -- named after Jones's father, by the way, not the Revolutionary War naval hero.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $800 – $900 MILLION


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## lesm (13 June 2006)

Part 2

_(Previous list continued...)_

RANK: 5 (TIED)
Stephen Feinberg

CITY: New York
FIRM: Cerberus Capital Management
AGE: 46

Known as the king of the vultures, Cerberus has some $16 billion in assets -- almost double its 2003 figure. Feinberg, who began at Drexel, personally runs around $4 billion, a portfolio that logged a 15 percent return after fees. He began in 1992 with just $10 million. Among some of his investors, according to media reports, have been Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and hedge-fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt. When the buyout world meets the hedge-fund world, a three-headed beast of giant deals, controversy and hefty returns usually emerges.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $500 - $600 MILLION

RANK: 5 (TIED)
Bruce Kovner

CITY: New York
FIRM: Caxton Associates
AGE: 61

Bruce Kovner's roughly $7 billion flagship fund once again generated high-single-digit returns last year, which is starting to become a trend for the once unstoppable commodities/macro titan. Nevertheless, his Caxton Global Investments still generated some staggering absolute returns -- at least $500 million. Next, take into account his other funds, some of which had pretty good years (the $350 million Caxton Alpha Equity, which Kovner comanages, for example, completed its first full year up 15 percent). Finally, consider that a lot of Kovner's own money is in the fund, and even by neo-conservative estimates it's clear the man is breathing some rarefied air.

Chairman of the board at the Juilliard School of Music -- he recently gave it one of the world's greatest music-manuscript collections -- he reportedly installed a soundproof music room in his Upper East Side townhouse so he could pound on a Steinway grand piano at night and not bother the neighbors. A staunch Republican, chairman of the American Enterprise Institute and backer, with Michael Steinhardt, of the New York Sun newspaper, Kovner has come a long way from trading soybean futures in his own account.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $500 – $600 MILLION

RANK: 5 (TIED)
Eddie Lampert

CITY: Greenwich, Connecticut
FIRM: ESL Investments
AGE: 43

Three years after a terrifying kidnapping and fresh off his Kmart coup, Lampert has the investment world at his command and some $15 billion under management. A value investor in the mold of Warren Buffett, he didn't have a 300 percent return on his Kmart position like last year; two of his two big long-term plays, Sears and AutoNation, were each up around 15 percent -- still not bad compared to the low-single-digit U.S. equity benchmarks. The man Richard Rainwater recently called "the greatest investor of his generation" is sitting on a mountain of assets, half of it locked up in Sears. Lampert's captors, by the way, are now locked up in prison.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $500 – $600 MILLION

RANK: 8
David Shaw

CITY: New York
FIRM: D.E. Shaw & Co.
AGE: 55

Now one of the biggest hedge funds on the planet, D.E. Shaw, with assets of around $20 billion, used its quantitative approach to churn out returns of roughly 20 percent in 2005. With 3-and-30 fees, this revenue stream boggles the mind. It doesn't all go to chairman Shaw, but enough does to put him in elite company. In the months ahead, we expect Shaw will be grappling with the tricky task of meeting regulatory obligations while keeping his computer-driven statistical arbitrage techniques from falling into the wrong hands.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $400 – $500 MILLION

RANK: 9
Jeffrey Gendell

CITY: Greenwich, Connecticut
FIRM: Tontine Partners
AGE: 46

It was yet another banner year for Gendell's enormous operation, which has been smoking the competition with a string of 100 percent–plus returns based on an activist strategy targeting industrials. When Tontine increased its stake in homebuilder Beazer Homes USA to 10 percent, Gendell demanded that management begin a share repurchase, which spurred a share-price hike of 25 percent within six weeks. On the philanthropic side, Gendell donated more than $2 million to Duke University, his alma mater, to fund two professorships in the new energy-and-environment graduate program there.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $300 – $400 MILLION

RANK: 10 (TIED)
Louis Bacon

CITY: New York
FIRM: Moore Capital Management
AGE: 49

A global macro maestro, Bacon orchestrated some solid performance for his $6 billion flagship Moore Global funds, which returned more than 15 percent last year. Meanwhile, several of his other funds (with some $4 billion run by several other portfolio managers) also fared well. The avid outdoorsman once again bagged quite a bounty.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $300 – $350 MILLION

RANK: 10 (TIED)
Stephen Mandel

CITY: Greenwich, Connecticut
FIRM: Lone Pine Capital
AGE: 50

It was a mondo-boffo year for Mandel, the Tiger Management alum, as his firm has now reached nearly $10 billion. His Lone Cedar fund, with $2 billion, was up over 20 percent. Mandel, who has expanded into long-only funds, is one of several hedgies who have indicated they don't plan to register with the SEC. We're guessing that could mean longer lockups. Clients likely won't mind.

ESTIMATED INCOME: $300 – $350 MILLION

Illustrations by Jeff Wong
Copyright  © 2005 Doubledown Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

Trader Monthly, 36 W. 44th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10036


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## wayneL (13 June 2006)

Hey! Not bad for mug traders!


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## pacer (13 June 2006)

The last book I red was The cat in the hat....up 500% in 5 weeks going short.

STRUTH MATE!


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## swingstar (14 June 2006)

Realist said:
			
		

> Hmm thanks.
> 
> What other books have you read? The only one I read was Darryl Guppy's - and I did not think it was that great.
> 
> ...




I directionally trade options on swings. I've read many books, but the ones I have open always on my desk are... Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (Tharp), Dave Landry's swing trading books, and the Market Wizards books (Schwager). 

I have that Business of Share Trading book but I think he puts a downer on trading. He starts off saying you need a ****load of capital and you'll only return 10% a year or something.


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## websman (14 June 2006)

Cool... I see you guys started a thread about me.


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## Magdoran (14 June 2006)

I agree with Staybaker and bowser, 

George Soros would be my first pick.  “The Alchemy of Finance” is a great source of inspiration for me, but also the biographical “Soros on Soros” is fascinating reading (not to mention a great way to untangle the more complex concepts ventured in “The Alchemy of Finance”).

I also think some other thinkers need a mention because of their influence in technical trading:  W.D. Gann followed closely by R.N. Elliott. (Gann was also a great trader of course).


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## nizar (14 June 2006)

Realist said:
			
		

> Out of interest, who is the Warren Buffett of the trading world, or the Ben Graham of trading?
> 
> Who is it?
> 
> ...




Greatest trader of all time: Nicholas Darvas

Did 5mins research per nite

Back in the 1950s (bull run wouldve helped): made over $2million from $25Gs in 18 months

2million maybe for some of u its peanuts but back in the 50s it was BIG MONEY

iv got no links but google him


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## nizar (14 June 2006)

Thanks lesm great post



> perhaps only a federal mint prints more money year in, year out than Cohen.




Thats respect


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## Staybaker (14 June 2006)

There's another article on those big swinging hedge fund managers available here. A lot of the same names pop up, but in a different order. Interesting reading.

Cheers, Staybaker.


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## phoenixrising (14 June 2006)

Some say Jesse Livermore, but not me because he went broke 4 times and suicided in the end. Reportedly made $100 million shorting the 29 crash (and broke 5 yrs later) Money management???


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## It's Snake Pliskin (14 June 2006)

Snake Pliskin


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## bunyip (16 June 2006)

phoenixrising said:
			
		

> Some say Jesse Livermore, but not me because he went broke 4 times and suicided in the end. Reportedly made $100 million shorting the 29 crash (and broke 5 yrs later) Money management???




Agreed about Livermore......someone who kept going broke cannot be considered a great trader.
He clearly had the ability to make monster profits, but obviously didn't pay enough attention to risk management.
Livermore would have more credibility if he'd ammassed a fortune and kept it, by producing a modest profit consistently year after year in good times and bad, and compounding his profits.

Bunyip


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## Realist (16 June 2006)

> someone who kept going broke cannot be considered a great trader.




They are merely a typical trader.


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## Freeballinginawetsuit (28 February 2007)

The greatest trader of all time>all these minnow new listings with nadda value but issuing themselves bulk shares/discounted oppies and diluting their holdings on the market........a few I could name.

Making millions without spending a brass razoo of their own coin.


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## nizar (28 February 2007)

Nicholas Darvas


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## tech/a (1 March 2007)

It's Snake Pliskin said:
			
		

> Snake Pliskin




*NAH!!!

YOGI

he never makes a BOOBOO*


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## megla (1 March 2007)

I'd love to know who is consisently the best stock competition winner... would be someone to pay attention to!


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## >Apocalypto< (1 March 2007)

Jesse Livermore

Greatest of all time who else cornered the cotton market on the own and lived to enjoy the profits!

Plus maybe the greatest short trader ever.

Yeh he went broke 4 times but that just proves his greatness imagine making millions then losing it all and borrowing money then coming back even stronger!

Close second Edd Seykota do I have to say any thing about him!


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## nizar (1 March 2007)

Ed Seykota nice 5Gs into 15mil over 12 years.


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## Bronte (1 March 2007)

William Delbert Gann 1878 - 1955
Reputed US$50 Million over 50 years.


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## ice (1 March 2007)

Livermore for mine. 

"Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" is the best/most useful book I have ever read about trading so I'm biased.


ice


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## Bronte (1 March 2007)

Somewhere in the book, I think Edwin Lefevre
writes that Gann bailed Livermore out (at least once).


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## Kauri (1 March 2007)

David Tweed...


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## ice (1 March 2007)

Bronte said:
			
		

> Somewhere in the book, I think Edwin Lefevre
> writes that Gann bailed Livermore out (at least once).




I never said he was any good at money management. lol


ice


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## theasxgorilla (1 March 2007)

Bronte said:
			
		

> Somewhere in the book, I think Edwin Lefevre
> writes that Gann bailed Livermore out (at least once).




Which book...I've read ROASO cover to cover on serveral occasions...never saw Gann mentioned, or even alluded to.


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## Bronte (1 March 2007)

Richard Smitten has also released three books on 'Jesse Livermore'
Jesse was one million in debt at one stage.
He was also + US$100 after 1929 crash


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## Bronte (1 March 2007)

ice said:
			
		

> I never said he was any good at money management. lol



 So very true 
Gann & Livermore link:
http://www.lambertganneducators.com/newsletters/jesselivermore.php


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