Top Successful and Richest Forex Traders

If you are reading this article, there is a huge chance that you are a forex trader or thinking of becoming one. The first question people often ask is, “Has anyone got rich from trading forex?”. Naturally, you would want to check if people have actually made millions by trading forex. But most of the time, people read about the most successful forex traders to get inspiration or tips on how to make a fortune by trading this popular asset.

This article will talk about the richest forex traders from around the world. You will get to know them one by one and see how they managed to earn their spot on the list of top successful and richest forex traders worldwide.

George Soros

If you have been in the forex trading business for quite some time now, you must have heard of George Soros. He was born on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary. In 1947, he moved to the United Kingdom to study at the London School of Economics, where he earned a Master of Science degree and a Bachelor of Science in philosophy.

During his college days, he had already developed a passion for trading. To jumpstart his career in business, he started working at banks in the United States and the United Kingdom. In 1969, Soros started his very first hedge fund known as Double Eagle, which was then changed to Quantum Fund. In 2011, Quantum Fund had a whopping $25 billion in funds under management.

George Soros was given the title of “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” because he managed to earn a billion dollars during the Black Wednesday UK currency crisis in 1992. He studied the market very carefully and decided to open a short position against GBP or the Great British Pound.

Because of this huge feat, George Soros is known as the most successful and the best forex trader in the whole world. As of the year 2021, his net worth sits at 8.6 billion US dollars. This also makes him the richest forex trader, and his net worth continues to grow to this day.

Joe Lewis

Joe Lewis was born in the United Kingdom on February 5, 1937. At the young age of 15 years old, he helped manage his family’s catering service business. After a couple of years of running the family business, he decided to sell it and invest the money in forex trading.

Although it sounded very risky at the time, Joe Lewis made the right decision. This is because he followed in the footsteps of George Soros. During the Black Wednesday UK crisis, he decided to invest his money to bet against the Great British Pound.

Because of this decision, he managed to wrack up a whopping $1.8 billion. This easily put him on the list of the most successful brokers in the world. To date, his net worth is nearing $5 billion.

Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller

Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller was born on June 14, 1953. He is known as an American businessman, philanthropist, and hedge fund manager. He also founded the Duquesne Capital in 1981. Upon the closure of Duquesne Capital in 2010, it possessed more than $12 billion in funds or assets.

Mr. Druckenmiller is connected to the most successful forex trader on this list, George Soros. For a period of over ten years, Mr. Druckenmiller worked at the Quantum Fund established by George Soros. During this time, he regarded George Soros as his teacher or mentor.

What made Mr. Druckenmiller a successful forex trader is his trading strategy. In the said strategy, he is able to generate long-term gains based on the concept of capital preservation. He actively chases gains when his trades are performing well and swiftly minimizes losses when they aren’t. 

This particular technique emphasizes the importance of maximizing your trading opportunities when you are able to accurately read the market and minimizing your losses when your predictions are incorrect.

Paul Tudor Jones

Paul Tudor Jones is famous for being a billionaire fund manager, philanthropist, and conservationist. Right after he graduated from the Univerity of Virginia in 1976 with a degree in Economics, he began his journey to learning about trading. 

He started with the New York Cotton Exchange by trading cotton futures. He was quite happy at this job, but he easily lost his position when his boss caught him sleeping on the job. 

In 1980, he took matters into his own hand and founded his very own hedge fund, which he named Tudor Investment Corporation. This was based in Stamford, Connecticut. 

But he did not stop there. Eight years after establishing Tudor Investment Corporation, he also created the Robin Hood Foundation. This particular foundation has helped him gain popularity because it focuses on reducing poverty.

He is most famous for successfully shorting and predicting the Black Monday crash that occurred in 1987. He was able to triple his initial investment because of this amazing feat, and he earned more than $90 million.

Bill Lipschutz

Bill Lipschutz’s passion for trading started in the year 1970 while he was in college. During this time, his grandmother, who unfortunately passed away, left him a sum of $12,000. He used the $12,000 to jumpstart his trading career. Surprisingly, he was able to turn $12,000 into $250,000 in a short period of time.

But because of one slip up, he managed to lose all his earnings. Naturally, he felt discouraged. But that was not enough for him to quit. Once he graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, he joined the training program offered by the Salomon Brothers. Here, he was able to gain back what he lost and even earned more than that.

Shortly after, he was recruited to be a part of their Foreign Exchange Department. By the year 1985, Lipschutz has earned the firm almost $300 million a year. Lipschutz is also the owner of Hathersage Capital Management.

He encourages traders to focus and learn from their losses. According to him, the majority of the richest and most successful traders are not right all the time. More often than not, they are only usually right 30% of the time.

Richard Dennis

Richard Dennis became one of the most successful forex traders because he managed to earn over $140 million in 2007. But just like any broker, Richard Dennis started out small.

After he graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, Richard Dennis jumpstarted his trading career by borrowing $1,600 from his own family. He invested a portion of this money in a position at MidAmerica Commodity Exchange. He used the money he had left as trading capital.

His modest sum of $400 earned him $3,000 in 1970. His capital slowly started to go up, and by 1974, he turned a profit of half a million by trading soybeans. It didn’t take him long to earn a million dollars after that. In fact, it only took him a couple of months. His newfound fame gained him a lot of followers, whom he called Turtles. He mentored these so-called turtles on how to trade efficiently and effectively.

Chris Wheeler

Chris Wheeler is well known in the trading community as the man who became a millionaire in a short span of two months. There’s no doubt that he’s an experienced forex trader. But how did he manage to make millions in such a short period of time?

In July 2011, Wheeler invested $25,000 in forex trading. His initial deposit of $25,000 turned into a million dollars in two months. Some people would say he was simply lucky or was at the right place at the right time. But he was able to manage this almost impossible feat because he took the time to study the market before you placed his trade.

Michael Marcus

Michael Marcus is a trader who has earned the title “Genius Trader.” Between 1969 and 1973, however, he frequently lost all of his money in a pattern of borrowing money and losing all of it. In 1973, he started to have some success in his trading career. 

He began working as a trader for a commodity firm in August 1974. As a trading fund, the corporation provided him with about $30,000 in cash. After about ten years, the fund’s yield had increased to around 2,500 times, with a total value of $80 million.

Michael Marcus began his career as a commodities research analyst for a broker. However, his passion for trading prompted him to leave his well-paying job and focus on commodities. Following a stint as a floor trader, he transitioned into a Commodities Corporation service company that hired experienced traders to manage its capital. 

Profits he made throughout the years, perhaps, even more than the aggregate of profits achieved by other dealers. In 10 years, he has expanded the company’s capital by an astonishing two thousand five hundred times.

When Ronald Reagan was president of the United States of America, Marcus made the most out of the high dollar to build big holdings in the market, claiming to have stakes worth around $300 million in Deutsch marks on a daily basis.

Ed Seykota

When he was employed by a prominent brokerage business in the 1970s, Ed Seykota began his trading career. Seykota created one of the earliest marketed trading algorithms for futures market money managing while working at that brokerage business. However, Seykota chose to cut ties with management after a few discussions over how management was meddling with his method.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Ed Seykota accumulated millions for his investors as a trend follower and money manager. He is a technical trend-following investor who bases most of his systems on exponentially weighted moving averages with some pattern identification.

Through the years, he has mentored a lot of traders, including Michael Marcus. A lot of traders look up to him and have learned how to trade efficiently by following his philosophy and strategy in trading.

Andrew Krieger

Andrew Krieger is known for being the “most aggressive forex trader” in the entire world. After graduating, he started his trading career by joining the Solomon Brothers. He only worked there for a short period of time, and then he moved on to the Bankers Trust in 1986.

During his time with the Bankers Trust, he managed to wrack up $300 million in a single day thanks to his strategic trade during the 1987 Black Monday market crash. Krieger carefully analyzed the market and labeled the New Zealand currency as overpriced. He then opened a highly leveraged short position betting against the currency. During that time, it was worth millions and millions of dollars.

But despite his legendary win for the Bankers Trust, he decided to leave in 1988 to join the Soros Fund Management. He mainly worked under Soros to learn from him and further expand his knowledge in trading. After a short while, he founded his very own companies known as Northbridge Capital Management Inc. and Krieger and Associates Limited. 

Bruce Kovner

Caxton Associates was founded in 1983 by Bruce Kovner, who served as its CEO for 28 years before retiring in 2011. Kovner then focused on trading the commodities and forex markets, knowing full well that his company was in good hands when he left it with his close colleague Peter D’Angelo. 

Over the past years, Caxton grew to be one of the world’s largest and most influential macro hedge funds. It currently has $12 billion in assets and an average net yearly return of more than 21%.

Bruce Kovner learned a lot from his mentor Michael Marcus. He implemented his mentor’s trading strategy and philosophy in almost every single trade that he executed. This helped him earn his spot on the list of most successful forex brokers in the world.

Sandile Shezi

Sandle Shezi is among the most well-known individuals in South African forex trading. From an early age, he showed a keen interest in the business. She started selling muffins at school as a teenager to raise funds while he was studying. He later went into the apparel industry and continued to deal in the foreign currency market using the money he earned from forex trading.

Shezi was able to jumpstart his trading career by using his tuition fee as his trading capital. He sacrificed his last year in school to invest in forex. It sounds like a very risky move, especially for someone at a young age. But Shezi got lucky and became one of the youngest millionaires because of the risk that he took.

He used his profits to finish his education, and he helped establish a company known as Global Forex Institute. This company is responsible for training thousands of young traders located in South Africa. His total net worth to date sits at more than $2.4 million. 

Neliswe Masango

Neliswe Masango has had dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon ever since she was a little girl. Although she was a start student, she was not able to continue down her desired path because her family simply did not have the funds to support her education.

So Neliswe tried shifting to a different profession, but she couldn’t stick with it. She decided to drop out after her first year in entrepreneurial management. She tried to find ways to earn the money she needed, and she came upon forex trading.

She slowly started to develop an interest in this profession after doing research on the asset. With her vast knowledge of the market and amazing work ethic, she was able to earn enough money in two years to open up her own business known as Bear Run Investments. Because of this, she became a successful and influential celebrity forex trader in her early 20s.

Shaun Benjamin

Shaun Benjamin was born in Swaziland to a middle-class family, and a single mother raised him in Newcastle, South Africa. Considering his status, it wasn’t easy for Benjamin to climb his way up the financial ladder. He wanted to pursue his engineering career, but the lack of funds hindered him from doing so.

Instead, he found an alternative, and Benjamin was able to achieve a certificate in coal mine blasting operations. However, he had higher ambitions for himself than working for someone else. This sparked his interest in investing, and he quickly became interested in forex trading. 

At the young age of 21, Benjamin managed to make his first million by trading forex. With his earnings, he established the Benjamin Forex Academy so he could share his knowledge in trading with those who were eager to learn.

Percy Smith

Percy Smith earned his fame in the forex market by becoming the youngest self-made millionaire. But despite his fame, he prefers to live a private life, and there is not much information about him. But we know that Smith, who was born in Guyana, a small South American country, immigrated to the United States when he was 12 years old.

Smith gained thousands of dollars investing in bitcoin while he was just 13 years old. At the age of 15, he started to shift his interest in forex trading. People often referred to him as “the dude,” and he drew a lot of attention when he began making large foreign exchange trades in the Turkish market.

Ref Wayne

After Ref Wayne dropped out of school as a teenager, he focused on trading forex for a living. By the age of 22, he became a multimillionaire and earned the title of most successful forex trader in South Africa.

Another reason why he’s so well known in South Africa is that he established the African Forex Institue. Aspiring forex traders go here to learn the ins and outs of forex trading in hopes of following in the footsteps of Ref Wayne. He also provides his own tutorials and lessons on forex trading to his students, and he shares all his strategies and knowledge with them. His net worth is nearing the $500 million mark.

Joshua Stewart

Joshua Stewart was an engineering student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He started to develop an interest in forex trading during his junior year when it was introduced to him and his group of friends.

Although they were excited by the idea of being able to earn millions in trading foreign currencies, they took their time to understand how trading works. They spent hours reading guides, watching tutorials, and familiarizing themselves with the movement of the forex market. Eventually, Stewart got the courage to open his first trade, and after a while, he managed to earn millions in this profession at the young age of 23.

To date, Joshua Stewart continues to trade forex while at the same time mentoring young aspiring traders.

Samuel Leach

Samuel Leach is a well-known personality in the industry of forex trading. He started out as a young and aspiring working-class kid. He got his very first job at a private financial institution by producing a 50-page essay about why the company should hire him. He did this by applying to the highest-paying jobs he could locate on Google, regardless of the degree of experience necessary.

His employment exposed him to the concept of trading forex. He applied to different universities while still working. He used his university scholarship to make his first investment in FX trading. With his earnings, he established his very own company known as Samuel & Co. Trading, and this helped him achieve the youngest millionaire status.

The Takeaway

There are more successful and rich traders out there, but the ones listed here stood out. That’s exactly why they deserve a spot on our list. And based on the short biographies of each of the traders, earning millions from trading forex is not always an easy feat. 

Although some people manage to easily earn their first million simply because they got lucky, it is hard to replicate that scenario. The best way to earn from forex trading is by investing your time in learning the ins and outs of this profession. You can’t expect to earn by investing in a random asset without giving it an ounce of thought.

The key to becoming a successful forex trader is patience and discipline. It’s easy to get excited by the concept of earning money by simply clicking on buttons on a computer screen. But you have to take a step back and analyze the whole situation before you invest your hard-earned cash in a certain asset. 

You have to learn how to discipline yourself too. Let’s say you invested $100 on a certain forex pair, and in a couple of hours, $100 turned into $1,000. When this happens, many traders tend to get greedy, and they opt to leave their positions open in hopes of earning more.

But the forex market is quite volatile during certain hours of the trading session. If you’re unlucky, you could easily lose all your profit, including your initial investment. So it’s always a good idea to pull out some of your funds before you open up another trade.

Frequently Answered Questions