Of all the traders gambling big sums on energy, a 32-year-old Canadian named Brian Hunter made some of the brashest bets and the fastest money.
Last week, he fell hard, proof of how quickly fortunes can reverse in gyrating commodities markets. Here in this bustling new energy frontier, Mr. Hunter headed the energy desk for a Connecticut hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors. At the end of August, trading natural gas, he was up approximately $2 billion for the year. Then
Mr. Hunter lost roughly $5 billion, in about a week.While energy consumers have seen their bills rise, many traders' paychecks have soared. Mr. Hunter is estimated to have taken home $75 million to $100 million last year.
He joined Deutsche Bank's energy desk and gained a name trading U.S. gas futures -- where his wide profit and loss swings provoked a stormy face-off with superiors.
Mr. Hunter personally generated $17 million in profit in 2001 and $52 million in 2002, according to a complaint he later brought in state court in New York. By 2002, he pulled down more than $1.6 million in salary and bonus and began supervising the gas desk in 2003.
In December 2003, just as his group was close to ending the year up $76 million, he claimed in the suit, things went awry.
In a single week, they had losses of $51.2 million, he said in the suit. He blamed "an unprecedented and unforeseeable run-up in gas prices" along with "well-documented and widely known problems with" Deutsche Bank's electronic-trade-monitoring and risk-management software, which he said hurt traders' ability to extricate themselves from bad trades. Deutsche Bank denied its systems were to blame.maybe it's time to check your fund manager's nationality . . .
make sure he's not canadian or english.
