Mr. Hall and his colleagues -- there are about 55 in the Westport office, and handfuls in London and Singapore -- specialize in a variety of hedging and arbitrage techniques.
Generally, Phibro looks for anomalies in the market and pounces, taking advantage of unusual spreads between the spot price of oil and the price of an oil futures contract.
The company, for example, often wagers that the price of oil will rise so fast during a particular period, say six months, that it can make money by storing oil in supertankers and floating it until the price goes up. (If the price rises by more than it costs to lease the tankers, he makes money.)
Other deals are more complex. Right before the first Gulf War, Phibro placed an elaborate bet that the price of oil would spike and then go down faster than others were anticipating. The company earned more than $300 million from the gamble.
"He's got great memory, great focus," says Philip Verleger, an author of books about oil markets and a friend of Mr. Hall. "He's not as arrogant as other people who make the kind of money he makes. Of course, you make that kind of money and you're going to be a little arrogant."
SHOOT: Simple answer - no. Are bankers supposed to placing bets, gambling with investments? Bring back banking the way it was first intended. To make loans available. Period.
Generally, Phibro looks for anomalies in the market and pounces, taking advantage of unusual spreads between the spot price of oil and the price of an oil futures contract.
The company, for example, often wagers that the price of oil will rise so fast during a particular period, say six months, that it can make money by storing oil in supertankers and floating it until the price goes up. (If the price rises by more than it costs to lease the tankers, he makes money.)
Other deals are more complex. Right before the first Gulf War, Phibro placed an elaborate bet that the price of oil would spike and then go down faster than others were anticipating. The company earned more than $300 million from the gamble.
"He's got great memory, great focus," says Philip Verleger, an author of books about oil markets and a friend of Mr. Hall. "He's not as arrogant as other people who make the kind of money he makes. Of course, you make that kind of money and you're going to be a little arrogant."
SHOOT: Simple answer - no. Are bankers supposed to placing bets, gambling with investments? Bring back banking the way it was first intended. To make loans available. Period.
 clipped from finance.yahoo.com
That suggests that last summer, drivers paid more at the pump, at least in part, because of people like Andrew J. Hall. How do you hand $100 million to a guy who may have profited because gas hit $4 a gallon? Whatever the answer, the case of Mr. Hall highlights the hazards of mixing the public interest with capitalism at its most unbridled, and it raises basic questions of fairness. A few years ago, he bought a medieval castle in Germany from the neo-expressionist painter Georg Baselitz, and he and his wife have turned the property, said to contain roughly 150 rooms, into a private museum for their collection.
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