Richest Traders & Investors In The UK

While not all traders make the big time, some of the richest investors in the UK have become millionaires, and even billionaires. This review lists the richest traders and investors in the UK and explains how they made their fortunes. Plus, look out for our bonus section of the hottest investors to watch in 2024. These promising British traders and investors look set to be next on the Sunday Times Rich List.

Michael Platt

Net Worth ~£13.5 Billion

Michael Platt is a Preston-born, British hedge fund manager and billionaire. He is one of the highest paid traders in the UK, and in the world, making it into the top 0.1% of earners. He is number 2 on the Forbes richest hedge fund managers list and just recently stormed back into the news after experiencing his most successful year since 2016 with 153% growth from his hedge fund, Blue Crest Capital Management. This makes him one of the wealthiest men in the UK.

Platt piqued the interest of savvy retail traders when he revealed his method for selecting employee talent. “I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site so he can pick off the US drunks coming home on Saturday night”, he remarked in an interview. “That’s the type of guy you want. Analysts, on the other hand, don’t think about anything else other than how smart they are”.

Platt began investing in the stock market at just 14 years old. He then went on to study at the London School of Economics, before starting his career at JP Morgan, one of the top investment banks and companies known worldwide for producing some of the richest UK traders and firms ever. He now resides in Geneva, Switzerland.

Chris Hohn

Net Worth ~£6.5 Billion

Starting life on a UK trader salary, British-born Sir Chris Hohn became one of the richest traders and hedge-fund managers in the world with his philanthropic fund – The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.

Sir Hohn is now worth billions and has been recognised for his charitable work by being appointed a knighthood. He is also one of the biggest investors in Extinction Rebellion, having given the climate activist organisation over £200,000 over its existence.

Joe Lewis

Net Worth ~£4.2 Billion

Joe Lewis is among the richest forex traders in the UK and the world. He notoriously collaborated with George Soros on one of the most famous trades of all time – the bet against the British Pound. Lewis and Soros correctly identified vulnerabilities in the Bank of England’s strategy that meant if the pound weakened beyond a certain point against the Deutsche Mark, they would be exposed to an even higher level of risk. When this risk became a reality in the Black Wednesday crisis in 1952, Lewis took home over $1 billion for his part in the short position, earning his way onto the UK wealthy list as one of the richest forex traders in England.

Lewis is a British-born trader and the majority owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, having made the purchase with the funds from his trading career.

In his early life, he worked in his father’s catering business in the West End of London but later sold the business to fund his initial investment in forex trading.

Alan Howard

Net Worth ~£2.6 Billion

Alan Howard is a British billionaire who made his wealth as a hedge fund manager and founder of Brevan Howard. Another frequenter of the Sunday Time Rich List, this man is one of the wealthiest UK citizens, with a net worth of more than $3 billion.

Howard is a big investor in cryptocurrency, having backed One River Digital Asset Management in their purchase of over $600 million worth of Ethereum and Bitcoin in 2020.

Akshata Murty

Net Worth ~£700 Million

Murty is an Indian-born heiress, businesswoman and venture capitalist, but makes it onto our list of the richest UK investors as the wife of British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

In 2013, Murty was given a director position at Catamaran Venture, a VC hedge fund. Her investments in Infosys and Jamie Oliver restaurants, among others, made her and her husband Rishi famously richer than the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Eileen Burbidge

Net Worth ~£100 Million

American-born Eileen Burbidge makes it onto our list as one of the richest traders and investors in the UK, having moved to London in 2004. Burbidge founded Passion Capital in 2008, and was an early investor in fintech, with investments in Monzo and GoCardless which skyrocketed Passion Capital to credibility.

Having previously held positions at Apple, Skype and Sun Microsystems, she is now one of the most influential women in financial technology, earning herself an MBE for her services to entrepreneurship.

Our experts have also compiled a list of the top 3 up-and-coming UK investors:

Steven Bartlett

Steven Bartlett is a British entrepreneur, investor, and the most recent Dragon on BBC’s Dragon’s Den. Valued at nearly £300 million with a bright future ahead of him, Steven is set to be one of the richest men in the UK under 30.

The Plymouth-born star initially made his millions as the founder of PR company Social Chain, but shot to fame with his successful podcast – The Diary of a CEO, the second most popular podcast in the UK.

Steven’s success earned him a spot as a Dragon on the hit BBC show. Investments on the show include cheesegeek, an artisan cheese retailer, and Piddle Patch, which produces real-grass dog toilets. He is also famously an investor in the food supplement company Huel, a long-standing sponsor on his podcast, which is now valued at more than half a billion dollars.

Nischa

@Nischa is a British-based banker and qualified accountant with nearly 300k YouTube subscribers.

She posts weekly videos on personal finance and business. In webinars such as ‘Habits that made me 6 figures by 24’ and ‘How I will become a millionaire by 32’, she explains her step-by-step formula for becoming rich, and how you can too.

There is no overpromising and under-delivering on Nischa’s channel – just straight facts used by real bankers in the industry. She is one to watch out for on the rich list in the future.

Harry Stebbings

Stebbings is a British venture capitalist who started his career launching ‘20VC’, a podcast that interviews some of the world’s biggest VCs. He famously turned just £50 into over £1.5 million by the age of just 26 – giving him the potential to make it to the richest man in the UK as he progresses through his career.

20VC has over 100 million downloads making it one of the most popular finance podcasts in the world. He has also launched his own fund named Stride.VC.

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