Victor Niederhoffer

He was born in Brooklyn, New York City, on December 10, 1943, and grew up in Brighton Beach. His father, Arthur Niederhoffer, was a New York City police lieutenant who later taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice; his mother, Elaine Niederhoffer (née Eisenberg), was an English teacher.⁠[1]

Opalesque’s obituary states that his father, Arthur, became a sociologist and criminologist at John Jay College after 21 years with the New York City Police Department, and that his mother, Elaine, was an English teacher, author and editor descended from a long line of rabbis. A 2004 Risk.net profile describes him as having grown up in a working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood.⁠[2][3]

His siblings are Diane Klein and Roy Niederhoffer. In a letter to his newborn son written in 2006 he recalled that his father read him, Diane and Roy a story every night for 18 years.⁠[1][4]

The 1978 profile reproduced by SquashTalk states that both of his parents were leading handball and paddleball players around Brighton Beach; he entered his first tournament at five and won three events, and at 13 beat the national paddleball champion George Baskin in a challenge match. As a boy he excelled at tennis and at wall games at the Brighton Beach Baths, which had more than 20 one-wall handball courts.⁠[5][6]

In his 1997 autobiography he wrote: “Brighton was the HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry of my education as a speculator.” The book describes the lasting influence of Brighton Beach, a bustling Jewish enclave, on his values, and the lessons in self-reliance he learned from boyhood friends, among them a neighborhood bookie.⁠[1][7]

He entered Harvard University in 1960 having neither played nor seen squash; in late fall 1960, when he was a freshman tennis player, Harvard’s squash coach Jack Barnaby introduced him to the game. Among Intercollegiate Individuals champions, men or women, he alone had no experience of the game before college.⁠[2][6][8][5][3]

Jack Barnaby, who usually left freshmen to the freshman coach Corey Wynn, spent about 45 minutes on court with him almost every day, and said he “never had a boy who learned faster.” In 1997 Jack Barnaby said in The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry: “He could think under pressure better than any player I’ve ever seen.”⁠[6][1]

In 1961, a year after entering Harvard, he won the national junior title: early in his sophomore year, unseeded, he won the U.S. National Juniors, beating his teammate and defending champion Bill Morris 15-12, 15-12, 15-12 in the final.⁠[5][6]

He played at number one in all three of his varsity seasons, and Harvard won the Ivy LeagueIvy LeagueThe Ivy League is an intercollegiate athletic conference comprising eight universities in the northeastern United States: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. It was formally established in 1954, with league competition beginning in the 1956–57 academic year. Its athletic framework emphasizes student status, academic standards, and financial aid based on need. The name is also commonly used collectively for the eight member institutions.Open the full entry title each year. In the 1962–1963 season he won the Harry Cowles Invitational, the University Club of New York Invitational and the Massachusetts State championship.⁠[6]

At the 1963 U.S. Nationals he beat the top seed, Sam Howe, and lost in the semifinals to Ben Heckscher. The College Squash Association’s obituary places the win over Sam Howe in the quarterfinals, while The Harvard Crimson in 1966 placed it in the second round, with a score of 15-14, 15-14, 15-14, and wrote that he lost the semifinal 3–1 to the eventual champion, Ben Heckscher. At the end of the season he beat Bob Hetherington in the semifinals of the Intercollegiate Individuals and lost the final to Ralph Howe.⁠[6][8]

He went unbeaten in the 1963–1964 season. At the National Intercollegiate Squash Tournament at Dartmouth in March 1964 he beat PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry’s Frank Satterthwaite 15-12, 15-14, 15-10 in the semifinals and Amherst’s Tom Poor 15-14, 15-10, 18-15 in the final to win the individual title; as captain he led Harvard to the team title with 17 points, ahead of Princeton and Army with 12 each. He announced at the time that he would retire from squash after the Foster Cup finals at Hemenway Gym that Friday.⁠[6][9]

At the 1964 U.S. Nationals he lost his semifinal to the four-time champion Henri Salaun, 15-12 in the fifth game. In a particularly heated match in 1964 an opponent gave him a bloody nose, and the sport’s governing body afterwards reprimanded him for his “verbosity.”⁠[8][3]

He graduated from Harvard University in 1964; The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry obituary gives his field as economics, while the biography on his own website states that he studied statistics and economics at Harvard and received a B.A. Wiley-VCH’s author note states that he graduated magna cum laude.⁠[1][10][11]

In the fall of 1964 he entered the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. During his graduate years he published papers on the clustering of stock prices, market making and reversals, insider trading and related subjects in Operations Research, The Journal of Business, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Financial Analysts Journal and The Journal of Law and Economics (see “Academic Papers”).⁠[5][12]

The biography on his own website states that he founded Niederhoffer, Cross and Zeckhauser, Inc. in 1965, a firm that helped sell privately held companies to public companies, and that with Dan Grossman, his partner for 40 years, he bought many privately held firms. Opalesque’s obituary states that he co-founded the investment bank with Frank Cross in 1965 while still a student.⁠[10][2]

At the 1965 U.S. Nationals, Henri Salaun defaulted, and he beat Bob Hetherington in the semifinals while ill with flu before losing the final to Steve Vehslage. The 1978 profile reproduced by SquashTalk, for its part, states that he won every major amateur tournament in 1965.⁠[8][6][5]

In February 1966 he won the USSRA tournament in New York, the first of his five U.S. national singles titles. His semifinal against Ralph Howe lasted an hour and 40 minutes: they split the first four games, the fifth lasted about 35 minutes, and with him leading 14-12 Ralph Howe took a 10-minute break to massage a cramped leg before he won; in the final he beat Ralph Howe’s older brother, Sam Howe, 11-15, 15-12, 15-13, 15-13.⁠[8][2][5]

In December 1966 his paper with M.F.M. Osborne, “Market Making and Reversal on the Stock Exchange,” appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, volume 61, number 316 (pages 897–916). Opalesque’s obituary judges that the paper is widely credited as the founding document of both statistical arbitrage and modern market microstructure.⁠[12][2]

He taught at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry from 1967 to 1972 as a professor of finance.⁠[10][2][13]

After five clubs in Chicago turned down his applications for membership, which he attributed to anti-Semitism, he skipped the 1967 Nationals and, apart from the 1968 National Doubles, stayed out of competition for five years. In his autobiography he recounts retiring from the game on principle after being denied membership in athletic clubs that excluded Jews. In 1968 he won the U.S. National Doubles with Victor Elmaleh.⁠[5][2][14][6]

In 1969 he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. The New York Times obituary states that he was in the university’s doctoral program in finance; Wiley-VCH’s author note states that he held a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.⁠[1][10][11]

He won the U.S. national singles title in each year from 1972 to 1975, for a record total of five; after losing to Anil Nayar early in the 1972 season, he regained the title that year in Detroit, and his fifth title came in the spring of 1975. He also won the U.S. National Doubles with Jim Zug Sr. in 1973 and with Colin Adair in 1974, for three national doubles titles in all.⁠[6][5]

In 1975 he beat Sharif Khan in the final of the North American Open to win the title. Sharif Khan was the six-time defending champion; he won in four games, was the last amateur to win the event, and, apart from Ralph Howe in 1967, was the only American to win it between Diehl Mateer in 1959 and Mark Talbott in 1983.⁠[1][6]

He turned professional at the Boston Open in 1975, and in 1977 he became a leader of the burgeoning professional organization, recruiting other players and helping to secure sponsors.⁠[5]

The biography on his own website and a 2007 article in Spear’s both state that he won the world squash title in 1976 and describe him as the undefeated U.S. national champion from 1965 to 1975 (Spear’s gives 1965–1976). He badly sprained his ankle at the 1976 Metropolitan Open, and 1977–1978 was his last professional season, played below his former level; on retiring he said, “I’ve lost the killer instinct.”⁠[10][15][5]

In 1979 he began trading for himself with $50,000. The New York Times obituary states that within 18 months he had turned it into $20 million; MoneyWeek states that in 1979 he bet on rising inflation by selling U.S. Treasury bonds and buying gold and silver, turning $50,000 into $10 million by early 1980, though the portfolio fell to $5 million before he liquidated it. The same year he published an article on the Dow Jones stock market futures contract in The Chicago MBA.⁠[1][13][12]

In 1980 he founded NCZ Commodities, Inc., also called Niederhoffer Investments, Inc. Eighteen months after he began trading he started a hedge fund that relied heavily, but not completely, on a computer program he had written to track patterns; the pattern-prediction program was first developed in the 1970s. He ran Niederhoffer Investments and Niederhoffer International Markets until 1997.⁠[10][1][3][13]

He published papers on market index futures contracts in the January–February 1980 and January–February 1983 issues of the Financial Analysts Journal; in 1983 “Predictions Fulfilled: The Early Experience of Market Index Futures Contracts,” written with Richard Zeckhauser, appeared in Readings in Investment Management, edited by Frank J. Fabozzi and published by Richard D. Irwin (pages 323–329).⁠[12][16]

Accounts of his relationship with 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 differ. Opalesque’s obituary states that from 1982 to 1990 he was a partner of George Soros, running all of the fixed income and foreign exchange trading; MoneyWeek states that he worked for George Soros’s Quantum fund for eight years; Spear’s calls George Soros the most famous patron among his clients; and The New York Times obituary states that as his returns rose to about 30% a year, big-name investors including George Soros began sending him their money. George Soros wrote in The Alchemy of Finance that he was “the only one of his managers who quit trading for him voluntarily while still ahead,” which the biography on his own website also cites. Risk.net states that his long and close relationship with George Soros faded around the time of his 1997 losses.⁠[2][13][15][1][3][10]

From 1985 to 2017 he hosted the NYC Junto on the first Thursday of every month. The email discussion group he ran on speculation, the spec list, became the website Daily Speculations, which has a “Vic’s NYC Junto” page.⁠[2][10]

In 1988 he was inducted into the Harvard Varsity Club Hall of Fame.⁠[6]

On February 10, 1989 he published the article “The Speculator as Hero” in The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry, page A12; he listed it among his key writings in the biography on his own website.⁠[12][10]

In 1992 he was inducted into the College Squash Association Hall of Fame.⁠[6]

After the 1987 crash his annual returns averaged about 30%; BusinessWeek named him the best U.S. commodities fund manager in 1994, and a performance database ranked him the top manager in 1996.⁠[3]

The biography on his own website states that Niederhoffer Investments returned 35% a year from its inception through 1996. For 1996, MAR ranked the firm the No. 1 hedge fund manager in the world.⁠[10][2]

His autobiography, The Education of a Speculator, was published by John Wiley & Sons; Kirkus Reviews gives a release date of February 7, 1997 and 464 pages, while Publishers Weekly reviewed it on December 30, 1996, listing 444 pages and a price of $29.95. The College Squash Association gives the year of publication as 1996, and Risk.net places it in the year before his 1997 losses. In the biography on his own website he calls it a best-seller about his life and mentors, including his father, Arthur. George Soros praised the “original mind and eclectic approach” of its author.⁠[7][14][6][3][10]

Publishers Weekly called the memoir “entertaining, outspoken and sometimes maddening”; the book draws market lessons from handball, chess, checkers, gambling, poker and tennis, surveys forecasting methods from the Delphic oracle to the Federal ReserveFederal Reserve SystemThe Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, it consists of the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).Open the full entry and ends with an “ecosystem model” of the futures and foreign-exchange markets, without offering a comprehensive trading system. Kirkus Reviews writes that the book links board games, casinos, horse racing, music, sex, sports and weather to the markets, puts forward ideas such as “LoBagolo analysis,” and closes with a tribute to his late father.⁠[14][7]

In August 1997 he tried and failed to pick a bottom in Thai equities, and by then his funds were down almost 50%. Accounts of these losses differ: Risk.net states that he bet the Thai baht would rise and that when it fell nearly half of his roughly $130 million fund was lost; Opalesque states that after returning much of its capital, the firm put the remaining roughly $100 million into markets where he later conceded he had no particular expertise, including selling put options on Thai bank stocks; The New York Times obituary states that he invested heavily in Thai securities, borrowing heavily against his holdings, and that the Thai currency then crashed. In 2004 he said: “Basically, I got killed in Thailand.”⁠[17][3][2][1]

Looking back in 2004 on his state of mind, he said: “I wanted to be number one again” and “I did not think I was infallible.” In 2007 he said: “We made a mistake back in ’97 by in getting involved in illiquid markets,” and that they had lost more than 100 percent of their assets in their South-East Asian ventures.⁠[3][15]

He had sold put options on the S&P 500S&P 500The S&P 500 is a U.S. large-cap equity index compiled by S&P Dow Jones Indices. It includes 500 leading companies, covers about 80% of available market capitalization and is described by S&P DJI as “widely regarded as the best single gauge of large-cap U.S. equities.”Open the full entry, betting that the index would rise; when the U.S. market crashed on October 27, 1997, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 554 points, those positions wiped out his funds. A business that had managed $130 million was wiped out in a day, much of it his own money; his futures broker, Refco, issued margin calls that forced him to sell his holdings at heavy losses that day, and within hours his fortune, business and reputation were gone. He and his investors were wiped out.⁠[17][3][2][15][1]

In a statement he published in 2005 he wrote that Refco had by then been his broker for about 15 years in a “mutually profitable” relationship; that by 3:30 p.m. that day the Dow had fallen about 550 points and circuit breakers had closed stock trading for the day; and that Refco asked to control the timing and handling of the open positions. He wrote that the two sides agreed to release each other from debts and obligations, that he paid the $2 million he personally owed Refco within a year, on schedule, and that two major law firms executed the agreement two days later. He returned the remaining money to investors.⁠[18][13]

He said that until 1997 he had not lost money for a single one of his hundreds of customers in nearly two decades. The losses cost investors’ money, his business, much of his family’s and his friends’ money, and many friendships. Spear’s wrote in 2007 that for a while afterwards he fell into such a deep depression that his family put him on suicide watch.⁠[3][15]

He mortgaged his house and himself and sold many of his assets, including his collection of antique silver trophies, his stake in a small investment bank and items from his large collection; a lot valued at about $3 million was sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1998, and his silver collection was auctioned at Sotheby’s. In 1998 he began trading his own account.⁠[10][3][15]

After a year-long break he began trading small amounts through a fund called Wimbledon, which by the end of 1998 was running on a modified version of his pattern-prediction program; he limited his trading to U.S. equities, added procedures to limit his vulnerability and made money again in the fallout from the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. He said: “Procedures were developed to ensure I would not become vulnerable, as I had before.”⁠[3][2]

Drawing on the tennis champion René Lacoste’s view that every great improvement in his game was preceded by a loss, he remortgaged his house, brought back former colleagues and rebuilt his money management business from scratch; Steve Wisdom, known as “Mr Wiz,” with whom he had developed his trading approach in the 1980s, rejoined him after 1997. In 2007 his firm was Manchester Trading. He said: “When you fail, the thing to do is to improve your basic ground strokes, your fundamentals.”⁠[15]

On May 14, 1999 he and four funds he managed sued the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and unidentified persons in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois; the case was assigned to Judge Ann C. Williams. The plaintiffs blamed the Exchange and others for trading losses in the market fall of October 27, 1997, alleging that certain index option settlement prices had been set incorrectly, and sought more than $100 million; Manchester Trading, LLC, which he controlled, claimed $5 million in injury over an option settlement price on August 13, 1998; and he also sought to recover losses caused by his own default at Refco, a clearing member of the Exchange.⁠[19]

In a statement of May 17, 1999 the Exchange said: “The Exchange believes this lawsuit is completely without merit,” adding that it had investigated the claims for more than a year, had given him documents showing that they rested on incorrect information, and had offered him in writing as recently as March 31 the chance to interview staff and review records, which he declined. Risk.net wrote in 2004 that he had sued an options exchange on behalf of his customers, claiming that options had been unfairly marked against him at much higher than market prices, that the litigation was eventually settled in a manner mutually satisfactory to both sides, and that he passed the full settlement to clients without deducting the large legal fees; the article does not name the exchange.⁠[19][3]

From 2000 to 2003 he wrote a weekly markets column with the financial journalist Laurel Kenner for CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry MoneyCentral. Laurel Kenner had spent five years as chief U.S. stocks editor at Bloomberg News and wrote several hundred stock market columns with him. In 2005 the header of Daily Speculations read “The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer and Laurel Kenner.”⁠[10][11][18]

In 2000 he was inducted into the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame.⁠[6][2]

In 2002 he resumed managing outside money with the Matador fund. The biography on his own website states that he began managing money for offshore clients in February 2002, investing his own money alongside the fund; Opalesque dates the start of Matador to February 2002; Risk.net writes that Matador was launched in January 2002 with about $100 million in assets, traded U.S. equities and exchange-traded equity derivatives and was offered only to clients of Octane, a Swiss adviser for which he was a sub-adviser, that by March 2004 it had been profitable for 20 consecutive months, and that his staff of about 20 exceeded that of Niederhoffer Investments in the 1990s.⁠[10][2][3]

In 2004 he was planning a fund in his own right and said that investors who had lost money with him in 1997 would pay no fees on it. Accounts of Matador’s returns differ: Opalesque states that it compounded at about 50% a year from 2001 to 2005, including 56.2% in 2005; MoneyWeek states that it returned nearly 50% a year from 2002 to 2006.⁠[3][2][13]

In February 2003 Practical Speculation, written with Laurel Kenner, was published by John Wiley & Sons; Active Trader magazine called it “the best trading book of the young millennium.” The publisher presents it as the sequel to the best-seller The Education of a Speculator, telling of his return to trading after losses forced him to close his fund; a 400-page paperback edition appeared in February 2005. The book criticises Warren BuffettWarren BuffettWarren Buffett is an American investor who took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and served as its chairman and chief executive from 1970; he handed the chief executive role to Greg Abel on January 1, 2026 and became chairman emeritus, while remaining a director, on September 18, 2026.Open the full entry.⁠[10][11][3]

After Refco collapsed in October 2005, press reports linked his 1997 dealings with the firm. On October 27 he published a statement on Daily Speculations disputing these reports. He wrote that The Wall Street Journal had stated on October 21 that Refco’s former chief executive had allegedly taken steps to hide debts that Refco incurred with his firm and as many as nine other customers, while quoting his denial that he owed Refco any money; that a BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry article of October 27 put Refco’s losses relating to the 1997 settlements and agreements at $35 million, a figure he said left out the offsetting value of the assets Refco received; and that media estimates put the losses at $45 million, a loss he wrote was not big enough to affect Refco’s compliance with capital requirements in 1997.⁠[18]

In 1997 he and Refco had agreed that Refco would take over his assets and assume his liabilities; some of his assets were part of the roughly $430 million that Refco’s former chief executive was alleged to have covered up, and he said his share of it would have been “minimal.”⁠[20]

In May 2006 his son with Laurel Kenner, Aubrey NiederhofferAubrey NiederhofferAubrey Niederhoffer is an American entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of the food delivery app Swoop, which started in Eswatini and is now based in Lagos, Nigeria, with the aim of growing from food delivery into a super app for Africa. He was named a Thiel Fellow in 2026.Open the full entry, was born. In a letter to his newborn son dated May 5, 2006 he wrote that the boy had been born in a big hospital in PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry and that, at 62, he was the oldest father the hospital had ever discharged; his mother, Elaine, had died one week before the birth, leaving three children and ten grandchildren, nothing about whom, the letter says, was too unimportant for her to attend to.⁠[4][1]

In May 2006 his Manchester Trading lost about 30% of its assets, or $100 million; by August 2006 his largest fund, Matador, was down 12%, against -1% for the Dow Jones and 2% for the S&P 500. He said: “I had a bad May, I made some mistakes, that’s regrettable,” and: “But one sparrow does not make a spring, and nor does one bad month.”⁠[20]

By early 2007 he had recovered his fortune and his reputation, but the subprime mortgage crisis later that year wiped him out again, and Matador exploded during the early stages of the 2007–2009 financial crisis. In September 2007 he was forced to close two funds, including Matador, which had lost more than three-quarters of its value; he cashed out many investments, repaid his lenders, returned the remaining money to clients and laid off several employees. Felix Salmon wrote that his hedge funds had managed at most a few hundred million dollars, most of it his own.⁠[1][2][21][13]

In October 2007 The New Yorker published a profile of him of about 11,000 words by John Cassidy.⁠[21]

He died of natural causes at his home in Weston, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, on August 4, 2026, at 82; his family confirmed the death. His brother Roy Niederhoffer announced the death, calling him “truly an extraordinary man,” and a Celebration of Life was set for Sunday, August 9, at 3 p.m. at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York.⁠[1][6][2]

His friend Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry, said: “His curiosity was insatiable.” The College Squash Association’s obituary closes by saying that he will be remembered as one of the most impactful squash players in the history of the sport.⁠[1][6]

He had seven children with three women and remained close friends with his former wife, Gail Niederhoffer. His survivors include his wife, Susan Cole Niederhoffer, and their four daughters, Rand, Victoria, Artemis and Kira; two daughters from his previous marriage, Galt and Katie; his son, Aubrey Niederhoffer, from his relationship with Laurel Kenner; and 15 grandchildren.⁠[1][10]

Spear’s wrote in 2007 that he had two failed marriages behind him, which had produced six children, all girls, and that he “is now embarking on his third”; he was with the financial journalist Laurel Kenner, raising his seventh child, a long-awaited son. In his 2006 letter to his son he wrote that the boy’s eldest half-sibling, Galt, was named after Francis Galton.⁠[15][4]

On December 14, 2024 Daily Speculations published a post titled “Father and son,” written in his voice, noting the 63-year age gap between him and his son, Aubrey Niederhoffer, recalling that his own father used to say he would be the happiest man in the world when his son could beat him at almost everything, and stating that until his stroke he could beat his son at most racket sports. On June 5, 2025 the site published a post titled “Aubrey and Vic in Thailand last week,” describing a tour of Asia of a few weeks with many books read and visits to museums, zoos, botanical gardens and aquariums.⁠[22]

The New York Times obituary writes that he was known for eccentric habits and large collections, including rare books, mechanical toy banks, paintings of shipwrecks, seashells and letters from scientists and presidents; Spear’s writes that he collected American folk art, antique toys and seashells, liked to wear bright colors and did not wear shoes at home.⁠[1][15]

The biography on his own website lists his interests as counting, ecology, electronics, entrepreneurship, free markets, music, sports, statistics and strategy in checkers and chess, and his favorite authors as Patrick O’Brian, Cervantes, Galton, Rand, Jack Schaeffer, Hugo, Melville and Twain. It states that he believed the purpose of life to be the pursuit of happiness and achievement, and voluntary transactions within an enterprise system to be the key to material and personal freedom and peace; and that he was proudest of his positive influence on others, with at least a dozen people he started out or taught having become billionaires or multi-centimillionaires, among them Monroe Trout, Stu Rose, John Hummer and Roy Niederhoffer.⁠[10]

The academic papers listed on his own website include “Clustering of Stock Prices” (Operations Research 13, no. 2, March–April 1965); “A New Look at Clustering of Stock Prices” (The Journal of Business 39, no. 2, April 1966); “Market Making and Reversal on the Stock Exchange” (Journal of the American Statistical Association, December 1966); “Alphabetical Properties of Stock Prices” (Financial Analysts Journal, March–April 1968); “Predictive and Statistical Properties of Insider Trading” (The Journal of Law and Economics 11, April 1968); “Presidential Elections and the Stock Market” (Financial Analysts Journal, March–April 1970); “The Analysis of World Events and Stock Prices” (The Journal of Business 44, no. 2, April 1971); and “Earnings Changes, Analysts’ Forecasts and Stock Prices” (Financial Analysts Journal, May–June 1972).⁠[12]

The list also includes “Genius,” his review of Douglas Casey’s Crisis Investing for the Rest of the ’90s in the March 1994 issue of Liberty, and “The First Speculatrix” in its July 1994 issue.⁠[12]

MoneyWeek writes that he set out to disprove the efficient market hypothesis by finding market anomalies, such as higher stock market returns on certain days of the week, and devised and tested systems, often with large amounts of borrowed money; it calls him one of Wall Street’s first “quants” and argues that his record shows how heavy leverage can cause catastrophic losses. He described his edge as short-term forecasting and an empirical approach to option valuation, said directional bets remained central to his work, and said: “We’re always honest with investors: you can’t make a lot of money without risk.”⁠[13][3]

On the Bloomberg podcast Masters in Business in 2017 he said: “I don’t believe that algorithms and robot trading is the secret to success.” His rule was “if you cannot count it, you do not know it.” Nassim Nicholas TalebNassim Nicholas TalebNassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) is a Lebanese-born essayist, researcher in probability and risk, and former derivatives trader. He is the author of the multivolume essay the Incerto, including The Black Swan and Antifragile, and is known for his work on tail risk, model error and “antifragility.”Open the full entry built part of Fooled by Randomness on the argument against him, and Malcolm Gladwell dramatised the opposition between the two in his 2002 essay “Blowing Up.”⁠[1][2]

Personal website: https://dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/VicNiederhoffer (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

University of California, Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]