Best Financial Trades of All Time
Not everyone can make a living off stock market, and of those who do, a miniscule of them manage to afford the life of glitter and glamorous lifestyle. Call it the sharp brains, the right timing, the right patience or plain sheer luck, here are the best financial trades of all times.
Number 1: Jesse Livermore
His first significant trade was shorting stocks just before the San Francisco earthquake which made him two-fifty thousand dollars. He then shorted the 1907 (“nineteen o seven”) market crash and made one million dollars. Then he made three million shorting wheat in 1925. The big money came when he shorted the entire market during 1929 crash and made hundred million dollars.
Though he finally shot himself in 1940 after losing it all.
Number 2: John Paulson
John Paulson was one of the very few people who predicted the housing bubble burst in 2007-2008. He shorted the subprime mortgages just before the financial crisis and his hedge fund made around 3 to 4 billion dollars.
Number 3: David Tepper
In 2009, just after the financial crisis hit, everyone started selling bank stocks. David Tepper, on the other hand, bought huge quantities of big bank’s stocks like Citigroup and Bank of America. By the end of the year, when these stocks bounced back, Tepper’s hedge fund netted 7 billion dollars, of which 4 billion dollars went to his own pocket.
Number 4: Jim Chanos
Jim Chanos analysed the company Enron for 2 years from 1999 to 2000. He came to know that the company was lying about pretty much everything and shorted the Enron stock when the stock was at 90 dollars. Jim Chanos was proved right when Enron scandal became publicized and the company filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. In the process, he pocketed millions.
Number 5: Paul Tudor Jones
He used technical analysis along with historical data to predict market crash in 1987. He was massively short on stocks and gained around 100 million dollars when the dow took a dip of 22%.
Number 6: Sir John Templeton
8 years before he died, in 2000, just before the dot com bubble popped, he shorted a whole bunch of internet stocks. When the dot com bubble burst, he made 80 million dollars in few weeks.
Number 7: Andy Krieger
In 1987, just after the Black Monday crash, investors dumped the US dollar which is generally considered a safe currency and rushed to other currencies. 32 year old currency trader, Andy Krieger realised that the New Zealand dollar, also known as Kiwi, was dangerously overvalued. He shorted millions of dollars’ worth of Kiwi netting his fund 300 millions of dollars.