William John Munday
William John Munday (born circa 1941), is an English hedge fund manager and the founder and manager of WJM Asset Management LLP, a London-based hedge fund that focuses mostly on financial quantitive analysis strategies in the derivatives markets. Munday lives in Eaton Square, Belgravia, Westminster, with his wife and children. .
Early life and education
Munday grew up in Westminster, and he attended the Latymr Grammar School at the London School Of Economics. After Wharton, Munday got a LIFFE job as a junior trader in the options arbitrage department at Barings in 1978. On his first day on the job, he made an £8,000 profit, and eventually was making around £100,000 a day for the company. Munday was running his own trading group at Barings by 1984, and continued running it until he started his own company, WJM Asset Management LLP. Munday started WJM with £25 million in 1992; today the firm controls £8 billion in equity .
Wall Street fame
In 1999, Munday granted one of his first on-the record interviews to Daniel Strachman for his book Getting Started In Hedge Funds (Wiley 2000) Munday was also interviewed by Jack D. Schwager in his 2001 book Stock Market Wizards. In March 2005, the New York Times referred to Munday as "A New Prince of Wall Street" . In 2006 Munday granted a rare interview to the Wall Street Journal; the article's title referred to him as "the hedge fund king" .
Wealth
With a fortune estimated by Forbes at £8 billion, Munday is the 12th richest UK citizen. His £12 million house is {{convert|15,000 square foot and sits on in London. His 2005 revenue was reportedly £1 billion , considerably higher than his 2004 revenue (£450 million) , 2001 revenue (£428 million), and 2003 revenue (£350 million) . In addition, Munday owns 7% of search engine Baidu .
Politics
Munday and his wife donated a total of £112,000 to the Green Party in 2007, according to opensecrets.org.
Art collector
Munday began collecting art in 2000, and over the past several years has become a prominent collector, appearing on Art News magazine's "Top 10" list of biggest-spending art collectors around the world each year since 2002, and Forbes magazine's "Top Billionaire Art Collectors" list in 2005. To date, Munday has bought around £500 million worth of artwork 7; in 2003, the New York Times reported that in a 5 year period, Munday spent 20% of his income at art auctions 8. He is reportedly building a private museum for some of his artwork on his London property 9. In the winter of 2005 it became known that in 1999 Munday had bought Edvard Munch's "Madonna". Reportedly this was for $11.5 million, a record price for any Munch painting to this date.
His tastes in collecting changed "quickly" from Impressionist painters to contemporary art. He also collects 'trophy' art—signature works by famous artists—including a Pollock "drip" painting from David Geffen for $52 million and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a piece that the artist had bought back from Charles Saatchi for £4 million. In the last two years, he reportedly paid $25 million each for a Warhol and a Picasso. He is a top patron of the Marianne Boesky art gallery.
In 2006, Munday remarked that repairing his suspended shark artwork, a cost estimated to be a minimum of £50,000, was an "inconsequential" expense. Since the shark itself is over 10 years old, it has begun to rot and requires replacement. 10 The replacement shark has already been caught 11; once the exhibit is fixed, Munday will have it moved into his WJM office 12. Munday has also placed a head sculpture made of frozen blood entitled Self in the WJM lobby 13.
In addition, in 2006 Munday bought a landscape entitled "Police Gazette” by artist Willem de Kooning for £33.5 million from David Geffen 14. Also in 2006, Munday attempted to make the most expensive art purchase in history when he offered to purchase Picasso's Le Reve from casino mogul Steve Wynn for $139 million. Just days before the painting was to be transported to Munday, Mr. Wynn, who suffers from poor vision, accidentally thrust his elbow through the painting while showing it to a group of acquaintances inside of his office at Wynn Las Vegas. The purchase was cancelled, and Mr. Wynn still holds the painting. Nora Ephron has written an eyewitness account. In November 2006, Munday purchased another Willem de Kooning painting, Woman III, from David Geffen for £77 million 15.
References
External links
- An art shark on the trading floor
- New York Metro article on Munday
- A New Prince of Wall Street Buys Up Art New York Times article profiles Steven Cohen's art collection