Andrew J. Hall: the British eccentric who made a killing on Wall Street

The UK-born commodities trader, who heads a “secretive unit” at Citigroup known as Phibro (so secretive there are no publicly available pictures of him), has made a personal $250m killing from oil futures as well as generating 10% of the bank’s total net income last year.

“Trading” may be the wrong word to describe what Hall, 57, does best, says Portfolio.com: he makes very large long-term bets, and sits back. The genesis of his latest punt came in 2003 when he anticipated “an important shift in the way the world valued oil”, says the Wall Street Journal. Prices had ranged from $10 to $30 a barrel for more than a decade, with the trend so pronounced that contracts on future prices were some 20% cheaper than the “spot”, or current, price.