Victor Niederhoffer

Victor Niederhoffer was a world squash champion and studied statistics at Harvard before becoming a futures and options trader. He mentored George Soros in his early career at Soros Fund Management. Niederhoffer built successful trading operations twice, but both ended in catastrophic losses — first in 1997 during the Asian financial crisis and again in 2007. His book "The Education of a Speculator" (1997) is a candid account of markets through the lens of probability, animal behavior, and personal experience. He rebuilt trading at Manchester Trading, advocating for mean-reversion approaches against conventional momentum strategies. His repeated ability to rebuild a trading operation after total catastrophic loss — returning to active markets and generating profits again from scratch multiple times — stands as a remarkable testament to the depth of his market knowledge and mental resilience, even as his career also illustrates the dangers of concentrated position risk in leveraged markets.