How Paul built the fortune
Jones earns his money by trading. He founded Tudor Investment Corporation in 1980 and built it around global macro investing, an approach that takes positions in currencies, interest rates, stock indexes and commodities based on views about economies, central banks and market psychology. As the founder and principal owner of the firm, he has benefited both from returns on his own capital and from the fees that investors pay to have their money managed.
His reputation was made in October 1987. Jones and his team had studied earlier market crashes and positioned the fund to profit from a sharp fall in stocks, and when the crash arrived the bet paid off handsomely in a year when many investors suffered heavy losses. That episode drew large amounts of new money to Tudor and established Jones as one of the best known traders of his generation.
The firm has since grown into a broad investment business with trading teams in several markets, including discretionary macro funds and systematic strategies. Jones remains its chief investment officer and still trades actively, and his public views on inflation, interest rates and assets such as gold and bitcoin are followed closely by other investors.
Unlike many fund managers who retire from daily trading as their firms grow, Jones has kept his hand in the markets. He is known for strict risk control, cutting losing positions quickly and limiting how much capital any single idea can lose. He has often said that defence matters more than offence in trading, and that the ability to survive bad periods explains much of Tudor's longevity over more than four decades.
Companies and holdings
Tudor Investment Corporation, based in Connecticut, is the core of his business life. Its main parts and related interests include:
- Tudor BVI Global Fund, the long running flagship macro fund
- Systematic and quantitative trading units that run rules based strategies alongside human traders
- Private investments and real estate, including property holdings and stakes in other ventures
Jones has also bought land for conservation and hunting. Because Tudor is a private partnership, most of its finances are not disclosed, and much of his wealth is tied up in the funds he manages.
Early life and career
Paul Tudor Jones II was born on 28 September 1954 in Memphis, Tennessee. He studied economics at the University of Virginia, where he also boxed, and graduated in 1976. After college he went to work for Eli Tullis, a well known cotton trader in New Orleans, learning to read markets on the trading floor.
He later joined a brokerage and traded cotton futures in New York before deciding he would rather manage money on his own account. He was admitted to Harvard Business School but chose not to enrol, judging that markets would teach him more. At 25 he launched Tudor Investment with a small amount of capital, and within a few years his trading record allowed the firm to grow quickly.
The early years in New Orleans and New York shaped his style. Watching experienced floor traders handle sudden price swings taught him to respect momentum and to pay close attention to how other participants were positioned. Those lessons became central to the macro approach he later applied across many more markets.
Philanthropy and public life
Jones is one of the founders of the Robin Hood Foundation, created in New York in 1988 to fight poverty in the city. Robin Hood funds schools, food programmes, job training and housing services, and it is known for measuring the results of its grants closely. Its annual fundraising events draw large sums from people in finance, and Jones has remained one of its central figures.
He also founded Just Capital, a nonprofit that ranks large companies by how the public judges their behaviour towards workers, customers and communities. He has given substantial support to conservation, including efforts to restore the Florida Everglades, and to his alma mater, the University of Virginia. He speaks publicly on markets and on the role of business in society.