Finance
Broke the Bank of England for $1B in a day
George Soros built a legendary fortune challenging market orthodoxies and profiting from the disequilibrium of global financial systems.
“The British pound trade.”
8 Courses · 40 Lessons · 5 Hours
Biography
Born in Budapest in 1930 to a Jewish family, he survived the Nazi occupation in 1944 thanks to false papers procured by his father. In 1947, he fled communist Hungary and arrived in London, where he worked as a waiter and porter to pay for the London School of Economics.
At the LSE, he studied with Karl Popper; the open society and the fallibility of knowledge would become the foundation of his theory of reflexivity—the idea that investors' perceptions alter the reality they are trying to predict.
After years of arbitrage in New York, he founded the fund that would become Quantum in 1969. On September 16, 1992, he shorted over £10 billion against the Bank of England; the pound exited the ERM, and he made over a billion in a single day, becoming “the man who broke the Bank of England.”
Global macro, concentrated positions, aggressive sizing when the thesis is strong, and immediate exit when facts disprove it. “It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.” He even listened to his body: back pain, he said, was a sign of risk.
Since the 1980s, he has transferred much of his wealth to the Open Society Foundations, donating tens of billions to education, civil rights, and democracy. He remains the definitive case study on risk, conviction, and market psychology.
His library
8 Courses · 40 Lessons · 5 Hours. Select a course to see every lesson inside it.
New to George? Start here
Understand how Soros's worldview informs his market strategies.
Beginner
5 lessons
From Budapest to Bretton Woods: An Intellectual Genesis
8 min readThe Popperian Influence: Fallibility and Falsification in Finance
8 min readBeyond Equilibrium: Why Markets Are Never 'Efficient'
8 min readReflexivity's Core: The Two-Way Feedback Loop Explained
8 min readThe Open Society Paradox: Freedom, Fallibility, and Markets
8 min readTiptico courses are independent educational analyses based on publicly available information, writings, interviews, speeches and documented decisions. The individuals featured are not instructors, employees, partners, sponsors or endorsers of Tiptico unless explicitly stated.
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