A Texan energy trader who emerged from Enron’s ashes, John Arnold, has been crowned as the new king of the hedge fund world with personal earnings of close to £1bn last year after a spectacularlysuccessful bet on the direction of natural gas prices.
Mr Arnold, the 33-year-old founder of Houston-based Centaurus Energy, correctly predicted that the cost of gas would fall last summer. His bet netted billions of dollars in profits for Centaurus. It was precisely the opposite call to that of rival Amaranth, which lost $6bn (£3bn) predicting that prices would rise and became the biggest hedge fund failure in history.
A list compiled by Trader Monthly magazine puts Mr Arnold as top earner in the financial sector alongside James Simons, head of New York’s Renaissance Technologies.
Of the 100 people on the list, 93 are hedge fund managers – underlining the power of the opaque, low-profile sector – and 27 of them are based in London. They earned an average of £120m, compared with an equivalent average of £55m in 2002, and five of them took home more than £500m.
