{"id":8159,"date":"2025-02-13T17:00:54","date_gmt":"2025-02-13T17:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.wearedeeperblue.co.uk\/history-clone\/?p=8159"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:01:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T11:01:17","slug":"king-edward-schools-michael-platt-joins-jp-morgan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.wearedeeperblue.co.uk\/history-clone\/king-edward-schools-michael-platt-joins-jp-morgan\/","title":{"rendered":"King Edward School’s Michael Platt Joins JP Morgan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Platt was born in Preston, Lancashire on 18 March 1968. He is a British billionaire hedge fund manager. He is the co-founder and managing director of BlueCrest Capital Management, Europe’s third-largest hedge-fund firm which he co-founded in 2000. He is Britain’s wealthiest hedge fund manager according to Forbes, with an estimated wealth of US$18 billion<\/strong> as of December 2024.<\/p>\n

Platt’s father taught civil engineering at the University of Manchester. Platt went to King Edward\u2019s School<\/strong><\/a> in Lytham (now AKS). Platt studied civil engineering at Imperial College London, but after a year, switched to mathematics and economics at the London School of Economics, from which he graduated in 1991. His mother was a university administrator. His grandmother, whom he has described as “a serious equity trader,” introduced him to investment. She “helped him buy stock in trust savings banks that were selling shares to the public.” At 14, Platt invested \u00a3500 in a shipping line, Common Brothers, that soon tripled in price. Some of his first investments were in Britain’s newly privatised utilities.<\/p>\n

Platt started in the City after his grandmother gave him some shares in which to invest and he discovered he had a talent for investing. He joined JP Morgan<\/strong> in 1991. Platt assumed responsibility for developing JP Morgan’s swaps and options trading business in April 1992, and in April 1996, became the head of trading for all swaps products relating to the 11 founding states of the European single currency, the euro.<\/p>\n

In 2000, Platt co-founded BlueCrest Capital Management LLP<\/strong>, with William Reeves. Discerning in August 2007 that “a stock market crash lay ahead,” Platt “sold his bank shares, and bought \u2018safe\u2019 sovereign bonds,” and thus “avoided the worst of the financial crisis, and profited from the resulting ‘flight to quality’ and plunge in interest rates.” As of 2014, BlueCrest was Europe’s fourth largest hedge fund. In that year, it managed over \u00a330 billion and employed 350 people. BlueCrest initially focused on trading interest rates and using computer algorithms to capture trends in bonds and commodities. In 2013 it expanded into trading equity to compete with Millennium Management LLC and SAC Capital Advisors LLP.<\/p>\n