Live look at me sprinting around the newsroom trying to find any headline that doesn’t involve Greenland, Looksmaxxing, or Donny Trade War cosplay…

Well, thanks to one genius trader in London, you’re in luck (miracles do happen).

The numbers are in for hedge fund profits last year… and instead of the usual suspects dusting off the victory cigars, the entire record book got tossed straight into the Hudson.

Because while most people assumed Citadel and Ken Griffin would once again be lighting up celebratory stogies and lecturing everyone about discipline, the actual top prize landed with Chris Hohn, who walked away with the biggest single-year profit haul in hedge fund history (yes, bigger than that year).

According to estimates from Edmond de Rothschild, Hohn’s TCI Fund Management generated $18.9 billion in trading profits last year, eclipsing both Citadel’s massive 2022 run and John Paulson’s infamous 2007 subprime mortgage windfall that still gets described on Wall Street as the “greatest trade ever.”

So how tf did he do it? He skipped the sexy bets and AI moonshots and leaned into large industrial and aerospace companies that benefited from a strong market and steady global demand. That’s it. That’s the trick.

(Source: Forbes)

Take TCI’s top two holdings. General Electric and Safran were up 86% and 42% last year with dividends, which is yet another reminder that boring, cash-generating businesses tend to do pretty well when markets aren’t actively breaking things.

And no, it wasn’t just a Hohn thing. Hedge funds across the board cleaned up last year, posting a record $543 billion in gains as stocks rallied and macro volatility handed traders endless swings to play. 

Even Bridgewater Associates, one of the oldest names in the business, delivered the second-largest trading gain of the year at $15.6 billion, reminding everyone that experience still matters when markets start moving fast.

(Source: Financial Times)

The math up top is still outrageous. The 20 largest hedge funds generated $115.8 billion last year while overseeing just 16.6% of total assets, and somehow they’ve managed to capture about 41% of all hedge fund profits ever.

Measured the more traditional way, the roughly $5 trillion hedge fund industry delivered its best annual performance since 2009, posting gains of about 12.6%. I think we all know who they have to thank for that (AI and Trump’s tariff obsession). 

It’s a pretty good reminder that when tariffs were tanking the market and everyone else was panicking, the top Wall Street traders were buying the dip BIGLY… which, not for nothing, is exactly what I was pounding the table for readers to do at the time.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in General Electric as mentioned in the article.