Business life [edit]
Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He graduated from Presbyterian Day School, an all-boys elementary school before attending Memphis University School for high school. Jones then went on to University of Virginia, earning an undergraduate degree in economics in 1976 as well as a welterweight boxing championship.[6]
In 1976, he started working on the trading floors as a clerk and then became a broker for E.F. Hutton. In 1980, he went strictly on his own for two and a half profitable years, before he "really got bored." He then applied to Harvard Business School, was accepted, and packed to go when the idea occurred to him that: "this is crazy, because for what I'm doing here, they're not going to teach me anything. This skill set is not something that they teach in business school." [7]
Jones' cousin William Dunavant Jr., whose Dunavant Enterprises is one of the world's largest cotton merchants, advised Jones to go down to New Orleans to talk with commodity broker Eli Tullis, who hired and then mentored him in trading cotton futures at the New York Cotton Exchange. Jones later said:
"He [Eli Tullis] was the toughest son of a bitch I ever knew. He taught me that trading is very competitive and you have to be able to handle getting your butt kicked. No matter how you cut it, there are enormous emotional ups and downs involved."[8]
In 1980 Jones founded Tudor Investment Corporation,[9] which is today a leading asset management firm headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Tudor Group, which consists of Tudor Investment Corporation and its affiliates, is involved in active trading, investing and research in the global equity, venture capital, debt, currency, and commodity markets.[citation needed]
One of Jones' earliest and major successes was predicting Black Monday in 1987, tripling his money during the event due to large short positions.[10]
Mr. Jones previously served as a director of the Futures Industry Association and was instrumental in the creation and development of an education-arm for the associationâthe then Futures Industry Institute, a research institute later renamed the Institute for Financial Markets based in Washington D.C. Mr. Jones was also an advocate for the design and implementation of the first ethics training course that became the standard for exchange membership on all futures exchanges in the United States.[11]