A Glimpse In Life Of John Paulson

John Alfred Paulson  is an American hedge fund manager who heads Paulson & Co., a New York-based investment management firm. He is called as “a man who made one of the biggest fortunes in Wall Street history” in 2007 when he earned “almost $4 billion” personally, when rest of the world traders losing money.

Paulson was born in 1955 in Queens, New York. In 1973, he entered New York University and studied creative writing, film production, and philosophy. Later he went on to Harvard Business School for earning an MBA degree.

Paulson started his first business venture selling cheap children’s clothing to his father back in New York who successfully marketed the clothing to several department stores. Later, Paulson and his father branched into wood parquet flooring.

Ambitious to work in investment on Wall Street, he left to join Odyssey Partners where he worked with Leon Levy. He moved on to Bear Sterns working in the mergers and acquisitions department, and then to Gruss Partners LP, where he made partner.

In 1994, he founded his own hedge fund, Paulson & Co. with $2 million and one employee, by 2003, his fund had grown to $300 million in assets. Paulson “shot to fame and fortune” when his investment strategies paid off during the subprime housing market crash. His bet against the subprime mortgage bubble has been called “the greatest trade ever” by Gregory Zuckerman who wrote a book by that title about it.

In 2010, he set another hedge fund record by making nearly $5 billion in a single year. However in 2011, he made losing investments in Bank of America, Citigroup and the fraud-suspected China-based Canadian-listed company, Sino-Forest Corporation.

QUOTES:-

(1) No one strategy is correct all the time.
(2)  I had to swallow my pride, buckle down the hatches, and just be patient.
(3) We’re not going to play a winning hand every day.