Report: Hedge fund czar Soros bet against Trump in late 2016 and lost big

by WorldTribune Staff, January 12, 2017

Leftist hedge fund guru George Soros bet big against Donald Trump winning the presidency, then doubled down and went bearish after Trump’s victory.

He has lost all of those bets – and nearly a billion dollars to boot.

George Soros went bearish after Donald Trump’s victory, and lost big. /AP

Soros became more bearish immediately after Trump won on Nov. 8, but the stock market has rallied on expectations that the president-elect’s policies will boost corporate earnings and the overall economy. The S&P 500 Index has risen 5.6 percent since Trump’s election (through Jan. 11).

As a result, some of Soros’s trading positions incurred losses approaching $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Soros contributed millions to super PACs backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign and analysts said it was no surprise that he was skeptical of the market after Trump’s victory.

Additionally, most Wall Street analysts believed that a Trump win would sow uncertainty and cause a sell-off.

Since Election Day, however, the Dow Jones industrial average is up nearly 10 percent, and all three major U.S. stock indexes have set all-time highs after Trump’s win.

On the flip side, Stanley Druckenmiller, a Soros protégé who worked at his firm until 2000, bet that the market would rally on a Trump victory, and that bet appears to have paid off as his firm gained 10 percent in 2016, the Journal report said.

Druckenmiller, who donated mostly to Republican legislative candidates, joins Carl Icahn as another notable hedge fund manager to make winning bets on the Trump revolution. Icahn said he bought $1 billion worth of stock futures on election night, as the market tanked, which made significant gains after its recovery.

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