George Soros Succesfull Trader
Trader, Forex No Comments »The Man who broke the Bank of England: George Soros
Born in Budapest, Hungary he escaped the Nazi occupation, studied at the London School of Economics and immigrated to New York City in 1956. Since then he founded Soros Fund Management and the Quantum Fund, which returned 3,365 % during its ten years (42.5% annually). Soros’s investing style was led by his belief in the concept of reflexivity, where the biases of individuals are seen as entering into market transactions, potentially changing the fundamentals of the economy. Soros argued that such transitions in the fundamentals of the economy are typically marked by disequilibrium rather than equilibrium in the economy, and that the conventional economic theory of the market (the ‘efficient market hypothesis’) does not apply in these situations.
His biggest fame came when he sold short more than $10 Billion worth of pounds on September 16, 1992, earning an estimated US $ 1.1 billion in the process. Aptly, he was dubbed “the man who broke the Bank of England”.
He now devotes most of his energy and resources as a philanthropist and political activist - providing funding to democratic, liberal and open market groups the world over. He founded the Open Society Institute (OSI), which spend around $400 Million annually in recent years towards projects in Central & Eastern Europe (democratizing and establishing capital markets) and Africa (poverty).
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George Soros Interview On 60 Minutes
When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, George Soros’ father was a successful lawyer. He lived on an island in the Danube and liked to commute to work in a rowboat. But knowing there were problems ahead for the Jews, he decided to split his family up. He bought them forged papers and he bribed a government official to take 14-year-old George Soros in and swear that he was his Christian godson. But survival carried a heavy price tag. While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.
(Vintage footage of Jews walking in line; man dragging little boy in line)
KROFT: (Voiceover) These are pictures from 1944 of what happened to George Soros’ friends and neighbors.
(Vintage footage of women and men with bags over their shoulders walking; crowd by a train)
KROFT: (Voiceover) You’re a Hungarian Jew…
Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.
KROFT: (Voiceover) …who escaped the Holocaust…
(Vintage footage of women walking by train)
Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.
(Vintage footage of people getting on train)
KROFT: (Voiceover) …by–by posing as a Christian.
Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Right.
(Vintage footage of women helping each other get on train; train door closing with people in boxcar)
KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.
KROFT: In what way?
Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and–and anticipate events and when–when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a–a very personal experience of evil.
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not–not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t–you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?
Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c–I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would–would–would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the–whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the–I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
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Mahathir Mohamad and George Soros.
Capital control
Asked to comment on Malaysia’s current monetary policy, Soros declined by saying that he is no longer a player in monetary speculation. However, he commented that Malaysia has suffered many missed opportunities by retaining the US dollar peg and capital control for far too long.
“But I am not saying that Mahathir is responsible for over-sustaining it (the US dollar peg and capital control),” Soros added. “Mahathir did the right thing in pegging the ringgit as it had helped stabilise the situation.”
Defending the act of currency speculators, Soros said it’s the authority (of every trading country) and not the speculators who should be held responsible.
“Speculators trade in accordance to the prevailing rules of the country and the respective authority should make sure that its (monetary) market functions,” Soros said.
Soros is in town to promote his latest book, ‘The Age of Fallibility: Consequence of the War on Terror’. Mahathir looks healthy and alert though he is recuperating from a mild heart attack.
Though President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made time to meet up when Soros was visiting Indonesia, little birds say our Abdullah Badawi refused to see him.
