How One Thursday Destroyed A 9 Billion Dollar Hedge Fund

Imperceptor covers the rogue traders, financial frauds, and Wall Street disasters that history forgot. In 2006, a thirty-two year old Canadian math geek working from his home office in Calgary, Alberta, named Brian Hunter, lost six point six billion dollars in twenty days of natural gas futures trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Hunter was the head energy trader at a Connecticut hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors, which at its peak managed nine point two billion dollars. By the end of September 2006, Amaranth had been liquidated. Hunter never went to prison and was never criminally charged. A federal appeals court overturned FERC's thirty million dollar fine against him in 2013. The CFTC settled with him for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 2014. Newsweek later called him the rogue trader who got away with it. This documentary covers the full mechanics of the Amaranth collapse: Hunter's one-billion-dollar profit on the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season including Katrina and Rita, his personal compensation of approximately one hundred million dollars under Amaranth's "eat what you kill" fifteen percent bonus structure, the 2006 repeat bet that failed because no hurricanes came, his control of seventy-five percent of the November 2006 natural gas futures open interest, the $560 million single-day loss on Thursday, September 14, 2006, and the fire-sale of Amaranth's energy book to JPMorgan Chase and Citadel for $2.5 billion. It also covers John Arnold of Centaurus Energy, the former Enron trader who made one billion dollars the same September betting against Hunter. Business inquiries: [email protected] #brianhunter #amaranth #naturalgas #roguetrader #financialfraud #documentary