Watch out Mr. Soros?
Financial Times; Friday September 1, 1995

School recommences next Thursday for 21-year-old Andrew Nissenbaum, a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in finance at Wharton business school. He is particularly looking forward to his first "speculative markets" course - but it is debatable how much he will learn. 

For Nissenbaum has just turned a $2,400 credit card loan he took out last December into a $3OO,0OO profit - trading futures and options. He is now setting up a hedge fund and wants to manage $200m, in a "fund of funds", within two years. 

Nissenbaum's interest was piqued by his professor Jeremy Siegal in a lesson about the January effect - the tendency of smaller stocks to outperform larger ones at the beginning of the year. 

He started trading futures in December, anticipating that effect, and rode the Wall Street bull in ensuing months. His other winner - arising from what he describes as a mixture of fundamental and technical analysis - was the dollar's rise against the yen - "a freebie" in his opinion. 

Less cocky than might be expected, Nissenbaum makes complicated options strategies sound like a course at junior high. But he is also driven, monopolising the schools single Bloomberg terminal and trading eight or nine hours a day during term. He often wakes three times a night to respond to the alerts from his bedside quote machine. For his summer holidays, he leased a seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. 

Making all the right noises about hedging and evincing suitable horror about the Nick Leeson disaster, he also cannot resist the odd boast. With funds of up to $50m, expect him to double his money every quarter, he says. 

At some point, his gravity-defying strategy will trip him up - and, depending on how he reacts, he might be a better trader for it. Meanwhile, there's no harm harking to his next tip - the Nikkei 225, set for a rise of 50 per cent in two years.