Clearly:

With hedge fund founders peppering the Forbes list of billionaires, top traders getting paid $100mn, and even interns being offered $35k a month, you can maybe see why it’s become a common complaint that hedge funds suck talent away from the rest of the economy.

Yes. Rinse and repeat for bitcoin treasury companies (#1350852, #1354338). Yet, under a functional monetary regime, this is also true:

But money, if you believe the hype, is a neutral medium measuring societal contributions. So maybe the best and brightest should trade their lab coats for gilets, notebooks for spreadsheets, and just generally stop trying to change the world for so-called “good”?

Smartest Investors of All Time ("SIAT" instead of "GOAT")

• Newton: nah, too messy with the mispricing gold-silver... and accidentally turn the 18th and 19th centuries into golden ones.

Newton lived and invested through the South Sea bubble — one of the most famous financial manias of all time. And in the careful work of Professor Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota, we can see quite how badly he did.

He cashed out too early (April/May 1720), with 100% gain... but then he YOLOed back in and lost a nice penny:

• Churchill: def not, real bad, as I recently learned in Aaron Ross Sorkin's new book, 1929. My god, was he a shitty investor, even a worse trader.

Churchill played a pivotal role in saving Europe from fascism and won the Nobel Prize for literature, but his relationship with money was less laudable. OK, it was chaotic....But the man could spend with sufficient aplomb to be almost permanently in serious debt.

According to David Lough, Churchill’s financial biographer, he found himself intoxicated by America’s moneymaking opportunities and gripped by investment fever. He picked up stakes in small exploration companies, oilfields, furniture, retail, gas and electric companies. He began to trade on margin, and within four months was sitting on earnings of £22k (£13.8mn in today’s money).

Real bad trading in 1929:

...the senior partner of his brokerage felt compelled to advise him to please stop buying worthless “gambling stocks” and by the middle of 1930 he’d lost a further £7k (£4.5mn today) on financial markets. Nancy/Paul Pelosi he was not.

LOLLOL

• Darwin? He bragged in a letter that he had no special talents, except keeping accounts and "investing money very well." SUUURE, I believe it when I see it:

Professor Janet Browne picked through the numbers and found Darwin a careful and successful investor, writing mortgages on Shropshire property and riding the wave of railway companies, canals and dockyard schemes into the 1860s before wisely flipping his portfolio into consols in the mid-1860s (there was a massive crash in 1873).

Even though he got a generous start to his marriage (£10k in locked-up marriage bonds), at his death his capital was some 30x that. Good job.

Achieving an annualised real growth in capital of 8.6 per cent per annum over 42 years looks impressive — although we’re not entirely sure how much his capital was swollen by two large inheritances.

• Mr. Keynes himself? Surprisingly, yes:

Mathematician, geopolitical strategist, economic adviser and general father of macroeconomics, Keynes had it all. Moreover, we don’t need to guess whether his true calling lay in HFT, macro-punting, fixed income arb, or long-short equities. Because from 1922 he managed the endowment for King’s College Cambridge, and the records have been meticulously pored over by a host of academics. Keynes took over a portfolio entirely invested in bonds and made the heretical move to trade this almost entirely into stocks — an asset class traditionally the territory of individual investors. The result was a portfolio that averaged over 15 per cent per annum investment returns for 25 years.

"Keynes outperformed UK stocks by 521 basis points a year, and suffered only six years of underperformance over the period" "Keynes outperformed UK stocks by 521 basis points a year, and suffered only six years of underperformance over the period"

Some others, not so interesting: Einstein lost most of his wealth to his wife in a divorce, Shakespeare bought farmland isntead of stocks, Jane Austen (#1350950) didn't really earn that much, Goethe got an inheritance and Leonardo da Vinci had gracious patrons. And, boring:

And it looks like Marie Curie gave most of any money that came her way to advance scientific research rather than boost her capacity to buy flashy toys.

archive: https://archive.md/Xlf84