George Soros is a famous and controversial investor and businessman who has built a career spanning more than 50 years. Born in Budapest, Hungary, on August 12, 1930, his life has taken him to different places, countries and economic situations worldwide.
In this Market Times article, we offer you a complete biography of George Soros, reviewing his curriculum vitae and delving into how he has managed his money over the years and how he currently does it. We will also learn a little about his personal life and his philosophy from him, since, like every successful man in business, it is interesting to know how Soros thinks and how he sees life situations and markets.
We invite you to accompany us with your reading until the end to know and learn more about this interesting personality.
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Who is George Soros?
George Soros is an American magnate, of Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity, and owner of one of the largest fortunes in the world. According to the latest data published by Forbes magazine his assets, amount to 8.3 billion US dollars, a large part of which has recently been donated to charity.
Soros founded and manages Soros Fund Management from the general management, an investment group that constantly bets on both value and emerging companies.
Soros was born in Hungary in 1930, but the dramatic social situation in this country in those years expelled him and, after a brief stint in London, he ended up in the United States of America (New York). There he made his professional career and he made his fortune.
Currently, he is a recognized businessman throughout the world, known for his dedication to solidarity but also for his controversial political positions. Soros is part of the American Democratic Party.
George Soros: Bank of England
One event that marked the life of George Soros and catapulted him to the global front pages of the media (and thus to his massive public exposure) was the bankruptcy of the Bank of England in 1992. This happened largely because Soros sold his exposed (ie short) position in the bank for $10 billion in sterling.
While, on the one hand, Soros earned a billion dollars with this operation in the midst of the British currency crisis of Black Wednesday, for the United Kingdom State this transaction represented losses of 3.4 billion pounds sterling, being a very strong blow to government finances.
This event was combined with other factors of the aforementioned financial crisis and led to the bankruptcy of the Bank of England, among other strong effects at a continental European and global level.
George Soros Investments
Soros is a successful investor. Between 1970 and 1980 it had profits of more than 3 thousand percent on the invested capital. In the 1990s he became a defender of an international political model based on economic liberalism with a certain degree of state intervention.
Regarding his particular style of investing, he generally bets on technology companies and loves disruption. It is known that it invests in many of the best-emerging stocks and even in some that are still not even listed on the capital market.
On a broad scale, as of November 2022, as of this writing, Soros’s top stock positions are:
| 🔥 Action | 💰 Portfolio percentage |
| Rivian Automotive (RIVN) | 8.2% |
| Amazon (AMZN) | 4.1% |
| JP Morgan Chase (JPM) | 0.8% |
| Tesla (TSLA) | 0.6% |
| Accenture (ACN) | 0.6% |
As you can see, there are no positions that exceed 10% of the portfolio. This is because Soros tends to diversify his investments quite a bit. Going through the rest of the portfolio, we find Google, Salesforce and many of the best technology stocks on the market. Take note for your next decisions!
George Soros personal life
George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930, the son of Tivadar and Elizabeth Schwartz (later his father would change his last name to Soros). He experienced numerous incidents during the German occupation of Hungary and then moved to the UK in 1947, together with his family. There, in London, he would study at the School of Economics and even obtain a Ph.D.
After several years of working in the London banking sector, he moved again, this time to the United States, and there he formed his first hedge fund called Double Eagle in 1969. A year later he created Soros Fund Management, the firm that governs until today and with which he has cemented his enormous success.
As of 2022, Soros has an estimated fortune of almost 7 billion dollars. She has had three marriages and five children. He is recognized as a politically committed personality with the ideas of economic liberalism, as well as being a famous philanthropist.
Books by George Soros
Soros has also developed his academic side through numerous books written on economics, finance and politics. Not only by own pen, but also in collaboration with other authors. We leave you below the books written by George Soros most outstanding by the public of global traders and investors:
- The New Paradigm of Financial Markets: The 2008 Credit Crisis and What It Means
- Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism
- The tragedy of the European Union: disintegration or resurgence?
- George Soros on globalization
- Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States: Essays
- Soros’s lectures at the Central European University
- The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror
- Underwriting Democracy: Fostering Free Enterprise and Democratic Reform Among the Soviets and in Eastern Europe
- The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Evil of American Power
- The crisis of global capitalism: The open society in danger
We have barely mentioned a few copies of his literary work. It is also relevant to note that he has signed a large number of newspaper articles.
George Soros Quotes
Like all successful investment men, Soros supports his management and his way of operating in the markets in a philosophy. We can perceive this through some of his best phrases, which reveal to us how George Soros thinks in relation to money, finances and, of course, life.
Here we leave you a top 10 quotes from Soros that we particularly liked, inviting you to continue your research about this character in his books.
- “I am rich only because I know when I am wrong”
- “Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux, money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.”
- “The key to obtaining great profits is to identify investments with a higher potential than expected by the market.”
- “In finance, recognizing mistakes and limiting losses is absolutely critical.”
- “Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and putting it to a practical test. The main difference is that the assumption underlying an investment decision is intended to make money and not to establish a universally valid generalization.’
- “If I had to summarize my practical skills, I would use one word: survival. By operating a mutual fund I have used my survival training to its highest level.”
- “If investing is fun, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making money. Good investments are boring.”
- “Financial markets are generally unpredictable. So one has to have different scenarios. The idea that you can really predict what is going to happen contradicts my way of seeing the market.”
- “The worse a situation becomes, the less it takes to turn it around, so the greater the advantage.”
- “Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman.”
final notes
We have come to the end of this biography of George Soros, one of the fifty richest men in the world as of 2022. Learning how the world’s most successful investors live, think and invest is a smart way to grow as a trading professional.
