John D. Arnold - Centaurus

Centaurus

When Enron collapsed in 2002, he founded Centaurus with his previous year's bonus. His company now has as much as $3 billion in assets under management. His employees include several big name energy traders including former Enron CEO Greg Whalley, as well as Bill Perkins, Mike Maggi, and Conrad Goerl, previously of MotherRock.

According to Arnold, "After Enron collapsed, there was a general revaluation of credit risk among energy companies. The better credits were less willing to take on the lesser credits as counter parties. So the lesser credits found themselves with fewer counter parties willing to trade with them, even though they still needed to hedge the pricing risks in their business. Hedge funds previously had not been involved in the over-the-counter market, except for the very largest, because the other participants were reluctant to grant credit to that type of entity."

During the collapse of Amaranth Advisors, Centaurus is widely credited as being one of the major players on the other side of their position, and returning as much as 150% in 2005.

At a recent energy conference, Arnold stated that he looks "to place bets on a market that he determines is ‘biased’ ... e ask ourselves can we identify what is forcing a market to price a product at an unfair value, and then, what will push it back to fair value." Arnold also referred to the speculative trading that was taking place on the unregulated over-the-counter Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and NYMEX's Clearport Trading: "Trading never went away ... hat has changed is the non-commercial type of interest ... ecause of this there has never been as much investor interest ... as there is today."

During August 2008, Centaurus acquired around 10% of the shares of National Coal Corporation (NCOC).

John D. Arnold recently made a rare public speech to the CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission), in which he opposed limits on financially settled trading positions but supported limits in the physical energy futures as they near expiration. As Arnold told the CFTC, "I try to buy things whenever they're trading below what analysis shows to be fair value and sell things whenever our analysis shows that the forward curve is higher than our analysis of fair value."

In 2009, John Arnold is believed to have made $900 million dollars.

In Forbes magazine's 2011 list of The Forbes 400, John Arnold ranked 91, with a net worth of $3.5 billion. In Forbes magazine's list of 2012 The World's Billionaires, John Arnold is ranked 377, with a net worth of $3 billion.