Lex van Dam

1 million Dollar Trader. BBC. London

Born in the Netherlands, Lex van Dam is one of the UK’s most respected hedge fund managers, as well as a leading financial educator. He began his professional career in 1992, trading stocks for Goldman Sachs where he worked for ten years, latterly as head of the equities proprietary trading desk. After that he ran money at GLG, which at the time, was Europe’s largest hedge fund. From 2007 onwards he has been a hedge fund manager at Hampstead Capital LLP. In 2009, Lex created and starred in a three-part series on BBC2, entitled Million Dollar Traders. The show aimed to educate eight ordinary people about the stock market, and Lex put up the sterling equivalent of $1 million of his own money for the novices to trade with over the course of eight weeks. At the end of the experiment, the novices had outperformed the professional traders. Lex set up the experiment to encourage the public to take greater control of their personal finances in the wake of the global financial crisis. Later that year, he released a companion book entitled How to Make Money Trading, which expanded on the trading techniques featured in the television series. In November 2010, he launched The Lex van Dam Trading Academy to teach people how to trade and invest. Lex is a regular public speaker at various local and international events, frequently quoted on CNN, Reuters, FT, and Bloomberg.