High-paying hedge fund hires super-star trader with taste for poker

Tudor Capital, the European arm of the US macro hedge fund founded by Paul Tudor Jones, has recruited Lawrie Inman, a former ‘super-star’ trader who is also a poker enthusiast and race horse owner.

Inman spent five years trading futures at Marex Financial until 2009 when he started The Buffalo Club, which organises poker tournaments in London. He’s also been working for himself, trading futures with his own money. He joined Tudor Capital on 5 August, according to the FSA register.

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Inman was the archetypal young, big-swinging trader sailing on the wave of the pre-crisis boom years. Aged 25, he earned a “seven figure salary” in 2006 and gained a place on the now-defunct Trader Monthly magazine’s top-30 young traders. He’s best known for making a £700k profit on a single trade after making a big bet on the direction of the five-year German government bond market, or Bobl, would move during a speech by former European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet.

However, he’s also a poker enthusiast – travelling to places like Monte Carlo in his spare time to compete in large tournaments – a pursuit he compares to trading: “Sometimes I’ll be sat at my desk at the end of the day, thinking I’ve done all the right things and made all the right moves, but I just feel like someone’s kicked me in the knackers, so it’s a lot like poker,” he told Pokerlistings.com. He also owns six race horses: “Friends of the family were involved in racing and my dad's granddad was a bookmaker, so it kind of was in the family,” he told the Daily Mail.

Tudor Capital’s European operation is run out of an ostentatious 25-acre specially-adapted stately home in Epsom, Surrey replete with onsite pool, bar and tennis courts. It’s known for paying its employees well, and this year its 21 members shared a compensation pot of nearly $70m (although the highest paid member received $27.6m of this).

Tudor declined to comment.