Paul Tudor Jones...The Movie

Take a good hour, relax and watch the documentary TraderL An Insight into the Life & Investment Strategy of Paul Tudor Jones. It will be one of the most enlightenting and educating things you'll do. Words cannot describe how much it will help improve your investing repertoire. If you call yourself a trader or investor and don’t know who Paul Tudor Jones is, then you have a serious problem.

For the rest of you, here is a brief bio to give some background on what both myself & Stocks on Wall Street consider to be one of the greatest fund managers/traders of all-time and a mentor we have long studied and used to implement our own trading strategies. Just the other day, we mentioned Paul Tudor Jones as he came in #5 on our top-ten-greatest-trades-of-all-time list for his infamous call of Black Monday in October 1987 when he predicted the crash, shorted the markets by betting a bundle and tripled his money as the market tanked 22%. That’s just one of the many great achievements this man has accomplished throughout his career.

The Man
Paul Tudor Jones II is the founder of Tudor Investment Corporation, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. As of 2009, we was worth an estimated $6.3 billion and was ranked by Forbes in March 2007 as the 369th richest person in the world. In 1976 he started working on the trading floors as a clerk, then became a broker for E.F. Hutton. In 1980 he went on his own for two and a half profitable years, before he “really got bored.” He then applied to the Harvard Business School, where he was accepted, and packed to go when the idea occurred to him that, “this is crazy, because for what I’m doing here, they’re not going to teach me anything. To be a trader, this skill set is not something that they teach in business school.”
 
He consulted his cousin -- William Dunavant Jr., one of the world’s largest cotton merchants, who promptly sent Jones to New Orleans to talk with commodity broker Eli Tullis, who then hired and then mentored him in trading cotton futures at the New York Cotton Exchange. During his time working for Eli, Jones said:
 
“He was the toughest son of a bitch I ever knew. He taught me that trading is very competitive and you have to be able to handle getting your butt kicked. No matter how you cut it, there are enormous emotional ups and downs involved.”

On His Own
In 1980, Paul Tudor Jones founded Tudor Investment Corporation, which is today a leading asset management firm headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Tudor Group, which consists of Tudor Investment Corporation and its affiliates, is involved in active trading, investing and research in the global equity, venture capital, debt, currency and commodities markets. They manage roughly $18 billion dollars in capital.
 
One of Jones’ earliest and major successes was predicting Black Monday when he tripled his money using large short positions.

The Strategy
Jones uses a global macro strategy when trading in some of his funds. If you want to see this strategy, it can be seen in the 1987 film “TRADER: The Documentary”. The film shows Mr. Jones as a young man predicting the 1987 crash using methods similar to market forecaster Robert Pretcher. This video is absolutely thrilling because of the amount of detail it gives into how he trades and manages risk.
 
The video used to sell for hundreds of dollars as competitors/enthusiast viewed it as the Holy Grail of Jones' trading strategy. It has been banned from circulation; only original copies exist. It was originally shown on public television in November 1987, however very few copies remain. Those that do are hoarded by traders who watch the hour-long movie in the hope of gleaning possible trading tips. According to Michael Glyn, the video’s director, Jones requested in the 1990s that the documentary be removed from circulation. Jones, in fact, even went as far as purchasing what he thought were all the remanining copies of the docunemnaty but was unaware of the power of the Internet and its viral nature.
 
As it is there are very few websites that have the original version of ‘Trader’ so luckily for you, Stocks on Wall Street was able to get its hands on the original. How'd we find it? Don’t ask. But If you have aspirations of becoming successful in the world of trading, then you must watch this video. If you have work in the morning -- don't go until you’ve watched it.

Don’t take it for granted as Jones remains on his witchhunt to remove it from circulation.