Who Are the Most Successful UK Traders and Investors?

As the biggest currency trading hub in the world, the UK has seen a number of billionaires and successful traders. Who are they and how did they become successful?

There are many types of traders in the world, from beginners hoping to gain a fortune from their trading hobby to professional traders with proper strategies and advanced tools. While most traders are in the red, some managed to be successful and even became well-respected billionaires. Here are the top 5 UK traders based on their net worth:

• Michael Platt – £13.5 billion
• Chris Hohn – £6.5 billion
• Joe Lewis – £4.2 billion
• Alan Howard – £2.6 billion
• Eileen Burbidge – £100 million

There is nothing simple about the success of a trader. One must go through a series of losses, drama, and speculations to earn such a title. In fact, losses are somewhat inevitable even for the best traders out there. UK's top traders are no exception, so let's explore each of their stories below.

1. Michael Platt

Michael Edward Platt, who was born in the year of 1968, is a British billionaire hedge fund manager. He is the cofounder and CEO of BlueCrest Capital Management, Europe's third largest hedge fund company which he started in late 2000 after working at JP Morgan for almost a decade.

A series of successful trades led BlueCrest to surge 153% in 2022, his biggest gain since 2016. Platt is now one of the richest UK traders and in the world. He is also ranked #2 in the Forbes richest hedge fund managers with a total estimated net worth of £13.5 billion.

Michael Platt has started to invest since he was 14 years old. His grandmother, who he described as "a serious equity trader", introduced him to investment by helping him buy stocks in trust-saving banks that were selling shares to the public. He then got enrolled at the London School of Economics, before getting a job at JP Morgan, one of the top investment banks in the world.

In 2016, Platt decided to shut his private investment firm BlueCrest to outside money as investors pulled out. Instead, he wanted to focus on managing his own and employees' capital.

With the freedom to control his own money, he took profits from bond and commodity trading despite high inflation and rising interest rates. These types of trades were able to push impressive triple-digit gains in 2022.

The company's success was largely due to Platt's genius risk management approach. Basically, he divides BlueCrest's assets between systematic (based on pattern-spotting computer algorithms) and discretionary (human-driven).

For systematic trades, he uses the trend-following strategy, meaning buying assets that are going up and selling ones that are falling. To ensure maximum gains in short-term trading, he aggressively cut losses and let winning trades run. He argues that the longer you keep those losses, the more opportunities you lose.

2. Chris Hohn

Sir Christopher Hohn is a British billionaire hedge fund manager who was born in 1966. He successfully built up a personal fortune of £6.5 billion, making him the 365th richest billionaire according to Forbes.

After graduating, Sir Hohn started working at a private equity group Apax Partners in 1994 and then moved to work for Perry Capital, a hedge fund on Wall Street, where he earned an estimated amount of £75 million. Sir Hohn is known for being very skillful as well as generous.

Hohn benefited mostly from long-only trades focusing on global stocks. In the early days, he put a lot of trust in what he called "special situations" by investing in various industries such as manufacturers, banks, and consumer product companies. He's known for having a "quality list" of target companies, containing information about each company like the enterprise value, margins, potential IRR over three to five years ahead, etc.

But since the financial crisis, he has shifted his focus from special situations and started investing more in monopoly assets with strong pricing power and high entry barriers such as Microsoft, Visa, and Alphabet.

Over the past decade, TCI has gained better annual returns and has never lost money since the 2008 financial crisis.

In 2003, he built his own philanthropic fund, The Children's Investment Fund Foundation. He was even named "the UK's most generous man" by the Sunday Times rich list, for donating no less than £755 million to charity in 2021 through the TCI.

On top of that, he is also the biggest single donor to the climate activist organization Extinction Rebellion, having given more than £200,000 over the years. In a couple of interviews, he expressed his love for charity and that his life's mission was to give money away.

3. Joe Lewis

Joseph C. Lewis, who was born in 1937, is a well-known British trader, businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is one of the richest forex traders in the UK and the world with an impressive net worth of £4.2 billion. He was previously the majority owner of the ENIC stake, which was also the owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

Lewis is familiar with one of the most famous trades of all time – the bet against the British Pound.

At first, Lewis and another professional trader George Soros collaborated to identify vulnerabilities in the Bank of England. They came to a conclusion that if the pound weakened against the Deutsche Mark, they would get an even higher level of risk.

In the Black Wednesday crisis in 1992, the risk became a reality. Lewis managed to take home over $1 billion for his successful short position. This played a huge part in his career, making him a billionaire overnight and a way to the UK wealthy list as one of the richest forex traders in the country and the world. He managed to repeat the story and took home huge profits when trading against the Mexican peso in 1995.

The Black Wednesday trade marked a new beginning for Joe Lewis' trading career. Before the trade, Lewis was regarded as a sensible, methodical trader who was careful with his risks. But then he drastically changed his strategy to seize the opportunity and it all paid off in the end.

The strategy that he used was simply aggressively short-selling a currency when it was not doing well. Both the Wednesday trade and the Mexican peso trade were an application of that strategy.

4. Alan Howard

Born in 1965, Alan Howard is a billionaire hedge fund manager and the cofounder of Brevan Howard, a hedge fund management company specializing in macro trading. He is named one of the wealthiest UK citizens by the Sunday Rime Rich List, with a net worth of no less than $3 billion.

In 2002, Howard created Brevan Howard alongside four other cofounders. The firm was once one of the world's top hedge funds with assets under management peaking at $40 billion in 2013. While a number of losses led to billions in investor withdrawals, the company managed to return the assets to around $30 billion in recent years.

Howard's specialty is rates trading using leverage. This allows him to take bigger risks to get even higher gains. According to some experts, his strategy seems to need volatility and movement in currencies and rates.

Furthermore, Howard is also a big investor in cryptocurrency. His interest started in 2017 and he has continued to invest in the industry despite the extreme volatility. In the past years, he has made various crypto projects and investments, including backing One River Digital Asset Management in their purchase of $600+ million worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum back in 2020.

Howard explains that cryptocurrency is a macro trend and a new asset that can and will heavily impact the industry in the upcoming years. He further argues that crypto trading must be done in a highly diversified manner. But even so, he always advises investors to do a lot of research before making any crucial decision.

5. Eileen Burbidge

Eileen Burbidge is a British-American venture capitalist who was born in America in 1971, but moved to London in 2004. She is the founder of Passion Capital and one of the most influential women in the investment industry and financial technology, earning herself an MBE for her service to entrepreneurship.

Burbidge started her VC career at Ambient Sound Investments, an Estonian-based firm started by her friends and former Skype founders. She often considers herself an "accidental VC" since she had no plan to become an investor.

In 2008, she founded Passion Capital. She was also an early investor in financial technology making investments in Monzo and GoCardless which boosted Passion Capital's success by a mile.

Back in the day, Passion Capital was the only London VC with a co-working space. They were also the first VC in the world to use a Plain English term sheet and not recharge any legal fees to their companies.

When it comes to deciding which companies to back up, Passion Capital focuses on the basic profile like the goals that they're trying to achieve as well as their ability to execute a plan. But softer skills like the motivation behind the ambition are also considered.

As an investor, Eileen Burbidge is particularly interested in three specific sectors, namely fintech, cyber/infosecurity, and healthtech/medtech. She also believes that these industries have a big chance to thrive in the UK.

For more investment tips from successful figures, explore 6 Valuable Trading Advice from World Renowned Investors.