Trader Monthly

Dow Jones Jon Housman, the former managing director of The Wall Street Journal Europe took a bite out of the magazine market last year. He started publishing the quarterly Style Journal, a luxurious free insert in the newspaper, and he made a deal with Doubledown Media to co-publish Trader Monthly in the UK. Trader Monthly is a beautiful glossy magazine coming out every 2 months. The most recent issue came out this week in the UK, keeping me and my team busy with the distribution and transportation set up from Belgium where it is being printed to London where it is being distributed.

Most startling article in this issue for mere mortals as myself is the astonishing list of what the best 100 Traders earned last year. The top earner in the UK is even from Belgium !! Pierre Lagrange, 44, works for GLG Partners. His estimated income: 295 -396 Million Euro.

(Pierre Langrange, Noam Gottesman and Jonathan Green joined Lehman Brothers in 1995. They ran multi-strategy hedge funds. A few years later they left Lehman to found their own company GLG (Gottesman, Lagrange, Green)(in which Lehman still holds a 20 % stake).

However this is nothing to what the number 1 Trader earned last year: John Arnold.

Arnold (33!!!!!) works for Centaurus Energy. His estimated income: 1.108 - 1.478 Million Euro.

Arnold created Centaurus in August 2002 with $8 million of his own money. That is 8 million dollar he earned at Enron which he joined in 1995 out of college. He was credited with booking $750 million in profits for Enron in 2001 by trading natural gas contracts (he was 26 at the time). His reward: an $8 million bonus, the largest bonus paid to any Enron employee in 2001.

Arnold started Centaurus with his bonus and three employees trading out of a single large room with a kitchen. Centaurus amassed $1.5 billion in assets since then. Today, the company employs 36 people, including a full-time meteorologist. It has been closed to new investments for two years now.