By:  Monnaie Warbucks

The Haidar Capital Management boss, Said Haidar, earned $859 million through gains on his personal investments and the share of his firm’s performance, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The huge windfall placed him sixth on the outlet’s ranking of the top-earning hedge fund managers of 2022 according to an exclusive New York Post report.

Little-known hedge fund manager Said Haidar reportedly joined heavyweights like Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and Mets owner Steve Cohen on the list of Wall Street’s top earners last year after his firm secured a massive 193% return, reports Thomas Barrabi of The New York Post.

According to The New York Post, Haidar is a former Lehman Brothers traders who launched his hedge fund more than 25 years ago, earned the windfall by correctly betting that decades-high inflation would force the Federal Reserve and other central banks to steadily hike interest rates.

“For the last year, investors have been prematurely anticipating an early end to central bank rate hikes, followed by rate cuts almost immediately thereafter,” Haidar wrote in a letter to clients last September, according to Bloomberg. “But as inflation globally has proven stickier than originally thought, central banks have become more forceful in countering this narrative.”

Haidar used a method known as leveraged rates trading to benefit from the policy tightening trend to amass assets worth $63 billion – despite starting the year overseeing just $1.2 billion states the New York Post.

The New York Post writes that Citadel’s Griffin still ranked as Wall Street’s top-earning hedge fund boss, with personal earnings estimated at $4.1 billion last year. He has a personal net worth of $30.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Cohen, who runs Point72, came in second place with $1.9 billion. He is worth an estimated $12.9 billion. Rounding out the top five were Millennium’s Izzy Englander, Renaissance Technology’s Jim Simons and D.E. Shaw’s David Shaw, Bloomberg notes.

According to his Wikipedia page, Said Haidar is a hedge fund manager who founded the macro hedge fund Haidar Capital Management in 1997. Haidar holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Harvard University. He studied for a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago but did not complete his dissertation.

The top 15 highest earners collected $13.8 billion overall, marking the lowest annual total since 2019. And despite his previous success, Haidar’s 2023 saw a rocky start after his fund sank 13% in January. Still, he’s confident inflation will remain elevated, forcing central banks to keep raising interest rates, Entrepreneur magazine pointed out

A hedge fund manager is firm or an individual who manages, makes investment decisions, and oversees the operations of a hedge fund. The official definition of a Hedge Fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives.