Alan Howard

Alan Eldad Howard was born in London and was fascinated by numbers from an early age. He attended the Hasmonean High School for Boys, where he excelled in physics, and in 1986 graduated from Imperial College London with first-class honors and a master’s degree (MEng) in chemical engineering and chemical technology.⁠[1][1][1][2]

After graduating, Howard joined Salomon Brothers, where he was assigned to the Eurobond desk and stood out for his ability to recall hundreds of customer positions and for his work ethic; on the desk he built relationships with macro investors such as Paul Tudor Jones, Louis BaconLouis BaconLouis Bacon is an American macro hedge fund manager and conservation philanthropist who founded Moore Capital Management in 1989 and serves as its chairman and principal investment manager. He founded The Moore Charitable Foundation in 1992 and donated the largest conservation easement the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ever received. In 2021, he took part in Bullish’s $300 million strategic funding round.Open the full entry of Moore Capital Management, and George SorosGeorge SorosGeorge Soros is an American investor and philanthropist, the founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Foundations. He is known for macro trading and for shorting the British pound in 1992, is also a major political donor on the side of the U.S. Democratic Party, and has long been at the center of political controversy and conspiracy theories.Open the full entry. During the 1994 bond market rout, he was short bonds.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][3]

In 1995, Howard moved to the London securities arm of Tokai Bank to head interest rate trading in Europe; two years later he joined Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), the investment banking arm of Credit Suisse, first as a trader and then as head of proprietary trading for fixed income in Europe. During the 1998 meltdown of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), his team sidestepped losses by exiting similar positions and moving into U.S. Treasuries; three years later, the team had generated $500 million in profits for CSFB.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2002, Howard and his fellow CSFB traders Jean-Philippe Blochet, Christopher RokosChris RokosChris Rokos is a British fund manager, founder and chief investment officer of Rokos Capital Management, and co-founder of Brevan Howard. An Oxford mathematics graduate, he trades global macro markets and supports education and research.Open the full entry, James Vernon, and Trifon Natsis left CSFB to start Brevan Howard; the name “Brevan” was formed from letters of the partners’ last names. Chief risk officer Aron Landy, a Cambridge-trained engineer with a Ph.D. whom Howard knew from Tokai Bank, helped give Brevan Howard its reputation for strict risk controls from the start.⁠[1][1][1]

Companies House records show that a company named Alan Howard Enterprises Ltd was incorporated on June 10, 2002, with Alan Eldad Howard serving as a director from June 2002 to May 2004; it was later renamed Brevan Howard Services Ltd. The limited liability partnership Rivage Capital Management LLP was incorporated on July 16, 2002, and took its current name, Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, in January 2003.⁠[4][4][5][5][6][6]

Brevan Howard started with $870 million in assets on April 1, 2003, the same month its flagship Brevan Howard Master Fund began operating; by 2009 the firm managed about $24 billion with around 310 employees, and Howard was co-CEO and chief investment officer.⁠[7][1][7][7][7]

In early 2007, Howard concluded that mortgage problems would spread and weaken banks’ willingness to finance hedge fund leverage, so the firm sharply reduced the leverage in its bond holdings, halved its credit default swap positions, and cut its bond portfolio from $50 billion to $10 billion; early in the financial crisis, Brevan Howard moved about 80% of its investments into cash. The flagship fund gained 20.4% in 2008, against a 19% loss for the average hedge fund, and by the end of 2008 the firm’s assets across seven funds had grown to $27.4 billion.⁠[1][1][3][1][1]

Howard moved to Switzerland in 2010; people close to him described it as a lifestyle choice. By September 2011, Brevan Howard’s flagship fund was valued at about $26 billion, and the firm was preparing to return $2 billion to investors.⁠[8][8][8]

Howard operated a charitable foundation supporting Jewish causes and homeless charities. The Alan Howard Charitable Trust (charity number 1107075), registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, reported income of about £1.6 million and charitable spending of about £4.23 million for the financial year ending April 5, 2010; it has since been removed from the register.⁠[8][9][9][9]

Brevan Howard’s assets topped $40 billion in 2013, making it Europe’s largest hedge fund manager. In the years that followed, amid quantitative easing, near-zero interest rates, and rising stock markets, the flagship fund generated low-single-digit returns or lost money for several years; investors withdrew nearly three quarters of the firm’s assets, which fell to about $12 billion by the end of 2016 and bottomed out at $6.3 billion in 2018. Beginning in 2014, the firm shut or shelved about half a dozen noncore funds and cut costs sharply.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

At Howard’s behest, Brevan Howard gave £20.1 million to his alma mater, Imperial College London, to establish the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis, headed by Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale, scholars of financial crises and contagion; the university called it one of the largest donations in the history of business education, and its president, Keith O’Nions, said Howard’s vision would help make the business school a global leader in financial economics.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Howard was a member of the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets (IACFM), set up by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2009. In October 2016 he attended, with Paul Tudor Jones, David Tepper, and others, a meeting chaired by then–New York Fed president William Dudley that discussed the timing of Federal Reserve rate increases, stock and credit valuations, and the impact of the Brexit referendum.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

As part of the firm’s restructuring, Howard began running the Brevan Howard AH Master Fund in March 2017, a personal, more concentrated and riskier vehicle for his best ideas that charges a 0.75% management fee and 30% of profits, rather than the usual “2 and 20.” The fund rose 30% in 2018, a figure the firm declined to comment on; the flagship fund rose 14.2% that year.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

Electoral Commission records show that Alan Eldad Howard made a series of donations to the Conservative Party beginning in November 2019, including £50,000 in November 2019, £250,000 in December 2020, £250,000 in November 2021, £1 million in the second quarter of 2023, £40,000 in January 2025, and £31,250 in February 2026. In 2010, his spokesman had denied that he was a Conservative Party donor.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][3]

Brevan Howard announced in a shareholder report that Howard would step down as chief executive before the end of 2019 and be succeeded by chief risk officer Aron Landy, who had been with the firm for 16 years; Howard was not retiring but would focus on his own trading and remain closely involved with the firm’s investment strategies.⁠[11][11][11]

Block.one announced the formation of its subsidiary Bullish Global to prepare the launch of the Bullish cryptocurrency exchange; after Block.one injected $100 million in cash, 164,000 BTC, and 20 million EOS and a $300 million strategic investment round was completed, it was capitalized with more than $10 billion. Howard was among the investors leading the round, alongside Thiel CapitalThiel CapitalThiel Capital is an American investment firm founded by Peter Thiel in 2011 that provides strategic and operational support for his investment initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures; Founders Fund, Mithril, Valar Ventures, the Thiel Fellowship, and Breakout Labs were all incubated by the firm or its predecessors. It also invests in startups in its own name, partnered with Pacific Century to sponsor the Bridgetown series of special purpose acquisition companies, and took part in Bullish’s strategic funding round in 2021.Open the full entry, Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, Louis Bacon, Richard LiRichard LiRichard Li (Li Tzar Kai) is a Hong Kong entrepreneur and investor. He founded the pan-Asian satellite television network Star TV in the early 1990s and, after selling a controlling stake to News Corporation in 1993, founded the private investment group Pacific Century Group (PCG). He has been chairman of PCCW since 1999 and is executive chairman of HKT; the insurer FWD, which he founded in 2013, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2025.Open the full entry, Christian AngermayerChristian AngermayerChristian Angermayer is a German entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Apeiron Investment Group, a private investment firm and family office. He co-founded the RNA interference company Ribopharma in 2000 and, in 2018, co-founded atai Life Sciences, a biotechnology company developing mental health treatments including psychedelic compounds (AtaiBeckley after its 2025 combination with Beckley Psytech), where he is chairman of the board; he is also co-founder and chairman of the board of Enhanced, a sports competition and wellness company.Open the full entry, Galaxy DigitalGalaxy DigitalGalaxy Digital (Galaxy Digital Inc., Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange: GLXY) is a New York-based digital asset financial services and data center infrastructure company founded by Mike Novogratz, which says it was founded in 2018. It provides institutional clients with digital asset trading, lending, investment banking, asset management, staking, and custody technology services, and is building data centers in Texas for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.Open the full entry, and Nomura, and became a senior advisor to Bullish together with Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, Richard Li, and Christian Angermayer. Howard said that bridging the gap between digital assets and institutional actors would shape the future of the financial sector.⁠[12][12][12][12][12]

In July that year, Bullish announced plans to go public through a merger with the special purpose acquisition company Far Peak, and the press release again listed Alan Howard among its investors. In September, Brevan Howard announced the formation of its digital asset division, BH Digital.⁠[13][13][14][14]

Brevan Howard: Official website: https://www.brevanhoward.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

BH Digital: Official website: https://www.brevanhoward.com/bh-digital/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]