Lex van Dam

Who is Lex van Dam?

Lex van Dam is a Dutch hedge fund manager and financial educator, specialising in trading in equities, currencies and financial derivatives. He lives in London.

Born in a small town in Friesland, van Dam studied econometrics and investments at the University of Groningen. His professional career began 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. Since 2007 he has been a hedge fund manager at Hampstead Capital LLP, London.

In 2009, van Dam featured in a three-part series on BBC2, entitled Million Dollar Traders that aimed to educate eight ordinary people about the stock market, in a re-creation of the famous "turtle trader" experiment of Richard Dennis in the 1980s. Van Dam put up the sterling equivalent of $1 million of his own money for the novices to trade with over the course of eight weeks.