The 11 Most Successful Stock Traders of All Time, Fact-Checked

On documented results, the most successful stock and macro traders include George Soros, who said he made about £1bn on sterling in 1992, Paul Tudor Jones, whose fund returned 125.9% after fees in 1987, Stanley Druckenmiller and Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies. For a quant approach look at Simons, for macro at Soros, Jones and Druckenmiller, for trend following at Richard Dennis. The list is not an audited ranking. Nine are here for documented trades, funds or careers; W.D. Gann and Brett Steenbarger are here for their influence, not for documented returns. Each fact links to its source.

The list mixes discretionary speculators, macro managers, a quant pioneer, a trend follower and one performance coach. Read it as a set of methods, not a ranking: the same market rewarded very different styles, and two of the 11 also show how a great run can end.

The 11 traders at a glance

Status is checked against a source dated 2024 to 2026 where one exists; for George Soros and Steven Cohen it rests on the current, undated pages of their own organizations. Where no reliable public source gives a figure, the table says so instead of guessing.

1. Jesse Livermore: the tape reader who shorted 1929

Livermore, born in 1877, traded stocks and commodities on his own account and became the model for generations of discretionary speculators. He made millions by betting against the market during the 1929 crash. He did not keep it: by 1934 the fortune of about $100 million was gone and he went through his third bankruptcy. He died in 1940, the year his book How to Trade in Stocks came out. His full story is on our Jesse Livermore profile.

2. George Soros and Black Wednesday, 1992

Soros, born in Budapest in 1930, built his reputation on a trade that is well documented. Sterling had joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990. On September 16, 1992, speculators led by his Quantum Fund sold the pound faster than the Bank of England could buy it; the Bank was buying about £2bn an hour before the government gave up and left the mechanism. Soros said later that he made about £1bn from selling sterling he did not own. The Treasury's cost was later estimated at £3.3bn.

What made it a great trade was the asymmetry: a currency held inside a band can only move one way if the band breaks, so the downside of the short was limited while the upside was large. The sketch below shows that shape: near the floor of its band, sterling could rise only a little if the peg held, and fall a long way if it broke. Soros, now in his nineties, chairs Soros Fund Management.

3. Stanley Druckenmiller: Soros's partner in 1992

Druckenmiller founded Duquesne Capital in 1981 and also managed money for Soros at the Quantum Fund, where he worked on the 1992 sterling bet. When he announced the closing of Duquesne in August 2010, Financial Planning reported returns that "had averaged 30 percent annually since 1986" and, citing Bloomberg, that he had never had a losing year; those figures come from the fund's reported history, not from an audit we could check. He has managed his own capital since, with filings still reported in August 2026.

4. Paul Tudor Jones: the 1987 crash

Jones, a Memphis native who started in the cotton pits, is known for calling the October 1987 crash. His main fund returned 125.9% after fees that year, and he earned an estimated $100 million from the crash itself. In 1990 the fund gained 87.4%. He co-founded the Robin Hood Foundation and was still giving market views in October 2026. He is one of the traders interviewed in the 1989 book Market Wizards. The chart shows the S&P 500 index across the 1987 crash with its 200-day average: the index closed below that average on October 15 and 16, the two sessions before the October 19 collapse. A chart shows what happened, not what Jones saw or did that week.

5. Jim Rogers: the Quantum Fund co-founder

Rogers, born on October 19, 1942, and raised in Demopolis, Alabama, started with $600 in 1968, co-founded the Quantum Fund with Soros in 1973 and retired a multi-millionaire at 37. His Yale class notes report a 4,200% return over ten years while the S&P 500 gained 47%; we found no audited statement of that figure, so treat it as reported. He later became known for commodities and long trips around the world, told in Investment Biker, and was still giving interviews in August 2026.

6. W.D. Gann: the most debated name on the list

William Delbert Gann was born in Lufkin, Texas, on June 6, 1878, and died on June 18, 1955. He built a method mixing geometry, time cycles and astrology, and wrote books such as 45 Years in Wall Street (1949). No verified account statement or estate record of his trading profits is public, so we do not quote a net worth. See our W.D. Gann profile and the Gann fan guide.

Gann's tools are geometric: he drew squares, angles and fans from a chosen high or low and watched where price met them. The square of 144, one of the best known, is laid out below; our Gann square of 144 guide shows how to draw it.

7. Jim Simons: the quant who changed the industry

Simons, a mathematician, founded Renaissance Technologies in 1978 and pioneered quantitative trading: models built from data rather than discretionary calls. The Simons Foundation describes him as a legend in quantitative investing. He died in New York City on May 10, 2024, at 86, so any article presenting him as an active trader is out of date.

8. Brett Steenbarger: the coach behind the traders

Steenbarger is not a fund manager. He holds a Ph.D., teaches at a medical school in Syracuse, coaches portfolio managers and traders at hedge funds and wrote The Psychology of Trading, The Daily Trading Coach and Trading Psychology 2.0. His net worth is not published by any reliable source, and we do not estimate it. He was still posting on his blog on November 1, 2026.

9. David Tepper: Appaloosa and the Panthers

Tepper is the founder and president of Appaloosa Management, known for buying distressed debt and beaten-down equities. A 2018 profile put the firm's assets at about $17 billion. That year he bought the Carolina Panthers for an NFL-record $2.275 billion, and he still owned the team in July 2026.

10. Richard Dennis: the Prince of the Pit

Dennis began as a runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at 17, became a trend follower and, in the early 1980s, trained the Turtles to test whether trading could be taught. In October 1988 Time estimated his fortune at $200 million and reported that his two public funds had lost about $50 million in a year. His current status is not published in any source we could verify. His dated career is on our Richard Dennis profile, including the Turtle experiment.

11. Steven Cohen: from S.A.C. to Point72

Cohen founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors in 1992. After an insider trading indictment in July 2013, S.A.C. entities agreed in November 2013 to plead guilty and pay an additional $1.2 billion to resolve the criminal charges, and in January 2016 the SEC barred Cohen from supervising funds that manage outside money until 2018; he neither admitted nor denied the SEC's findings. The firm became the Point72 family office in 2014 and took outside capital again in 2018. He is its chairman and CEO.

What the list has in common

Three traits recur in the documented careers. First, a clear edge: a macro imbalance for Soros, Jones and Druckenmiller, data and models for Simons, trend persistence for Dennis. Second, position sizing that let them survive being wrong. Our reading of Livermore in the 1930s and of Dennis's public funds in 1987 and 1988 is that this is the part that failed; the sources we cite record the losses, not their cause. The rule is the same at any account size: decide the amount you accept to lose, then size the position from the distance to your stop. Third, records that are partly reported rather than audited: treat any single return figure as a claim, not a benchmark to chase.

The failures are as instructive as the wins: our list of the worst hedge fund losses shows what happens when leverage meets a wrong thesis, and the trading quotes page collects what several of these traders said about risk. For more profiles, browse our famous traders section.