Victor Niederhoffer

Who is Victor Niederhoffer?

Victor Niederhoffer is a hedge fund manager, champion squash player, bestselling author and statistician.

Victor Niederhoffer was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family. His father, Arthur, graduated from Brooklyn Law School but went to work in the police. Victor’s mother, Elaine was a teacher. Niederhoffer studied statistics and economics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He was a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965, while still at college, he co-founded with Frank Cross a company called Niederhoffer, Cross and Zeckhauser, Inc., an investment bank which sold privately held firms to public companies. This firm is now called Niederhoffer Henkel, and is run by Lee Henkel, the former general counsel to the IRS. Niederhoffer pioneered a mass marketing approach in investment banking and did a large volume of small deals at this firm. He also bought many privately held firms with Dan Grossman, his partner during this period.

As a college professor in the 1960s and 1970s, Niederhoffer wrote numerous influential academic articles about market inefficiencies, which led to the founding in 1980 of a trading firm, NCZ Commodities, Inc.. The success of this firm attracted the attention of George Soros. Niederhoffer became a partner of Soros and managed all of the fixed income and foreign exchange from 1982 to 1990. Soros said in The Alchemy of Finance that Niederhoffer was the only one of his managers who retired voluntarily from trading for him while still ahead. Soros held Niederhoffer in such high esteem that he sent his son to work for him to learn how to trade.