How gran’s £500 gift turned into £2.4bn fortune
Hedge fund boss made £300m last year
IT started with a £500 birthday gift from his grandmother which he quickly tripled during his first dalliance in the markets at the tender age of 14.
Now, as the richest hedge fund manager in Britain, Michael Platt has seen his wealth soar by £300million in the past year to an estimated £2.4billion.
The 49-year- old financier was brought up in a relatively modest household in Preston but now has a Bombardier Challenger private jet and a large collection of contemporary art, with a private showroom in the crypt of a deconsecrated church.
He has strengthened his position at the top of The Sunday Times Rich List of hedge fund managers in the UK after a turbulent year for investors which saw some of his rivals fall victim to the uncertainty surrounding Brexit.
The collective wealth of the top ten totals almost £11billion and rose by £500million in the past 12 months. But more than half of the increase came from Mr Platt, who co-founded BlueCrest Capital Management in 2000.
Another hedge fund manager, Crispin Odey, has suffered a stark contrast of fortunes. The prominent Leave supporter donated £870,000 to campaign groups, but his pessimistic bets on the economy following the Brexit referendum backfired when the market rallied. His Odey Asset Management lost £125million last year.
Mr Platt, whose father taught civil engineering at the University of Manchester and whose mother was a university administrator, credits his late grandmother with getting him ‘addicted’ to investment. A serious equity trader herself, she gave him the means to put his first wager on a littleknown shipping line named Common Brothers while he was still at school, which tripled to £1,500.
After graduating from the London School of Economics he became a managing director at JP Morgan before founding BlueCrest with William Reeves.
While Mr Reeves, an American, has since retired to Hawaii, Mr Platt oversaw a change in strategy at BlueCrest which saw the fund shut its doors to outside clients in order to focus on the wealth of partners and members.
The move seems to have worked with the fund reporting a 50 per cent gain during 2016, according to The Sunday Times Rich List which is published tomorrow. Mr Platt was once asked what he looked for in a trader, replying that it was ‘the type of guy who gets up at seven o’clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site so that he can pick off the drunks coming home on Saturday night’.
He added: ‘I hired a guy like that. He usually clears five or ten grand every Sunday morning before breakfast taking out the drunks.’
Second on the rich list, as last year, are Robert Miller and his daughter Marie-Chantal, of Search Investment Group, with an unchanged £1.58billion. David Harding, founder of Winton Capital Management, moved up a place to third after netting up to £150million in the past year.
Sir Chris Hohn, who had to fork out £337million to ex-wife Jamie Cooper when they divorced in 2014, saw his wealth rise by £100million.
Robert Watts, compiler of the rich list, said the differing fortunes reflected the ‘astonishing events’ of the last 12 months. ‘Brexit has created some golden opportunities for the hedge fund world – and some massive pitfalls,’ he said.