If a hedge fund doesn't hire Brian Hunter, the former Amaranth Advisors trader who helped blow up the fund to the tune of $6.5 billion when his calendar-spread bets went south, some university should probably hire him as a professor.
On the witness stand this week at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's hearing on his alleged market manipulation (the trades in question had nothing to do with the fund's later collapse), Hunter has taken the room to Brian's School of Gas Futures Trading.
Dressed daily in subdued suits, the tall (6'4"?), athletically built Hunter explains everything from 'long' and 'short' and 'put' and 'call' to price curves to portfolio theory and spread bets. All for an audience of one, the judge who will decide the case.
Becoming increasingly engrossed in his explanations, Judge Carmen Cintron at times interrupts Hunter, his hands still raised to illustrate a point, and reminds him to talk slower, both for the court reporters and, she readily admits, herself, as she tries to understand gas futures trading.
Not surprising. This is FERC's first-ever attempt to police futures trading; normally the FERC regulates physical gas markets.
Not surprising about Hunter either. As a former co-worker at TransCanada once told us about him: "He acted like he was the smartest guy in the room. He probably was."
In three days of testimony, more details of the reclusive trader's personality and background have unavoidably emerged, revealing a western Canadian Horatio Alger (a fact the government's attorney pointed out and tried to slap down in his opening argument: "he still broke the law.").
Hunter doesn't agree and is now the last man standing against the US regulators. His former employer Amaranth and former co-worker Matt Donohue have both settled with the FERC despite doubts about the commission even having jurisdiction over futures trading.
Hunter grew up outside Calgary in rural Alberta, the court learned, his mother a school teacher and his father, ironically, an oil and gas salesman.
He went to the University of Alberta (the Golden Bears) on a combination of academic and athletic scholarships. Hunter played basketball as a "shooting guard," in his words, and while university officials are still on summer vacation north of the border, a quick read of the Golden Bears basketball Web site indicates Hunter played ball for the Bears while they turned around from a sub-.500 ball club to consistent winners, taking both the Canada West and Canadian Interuniversity Sports titles in 1992 and 1993.
He studied math and physics an undergrad and graduate student and then took a job in pipeline operator TransCanada's exotic derivatives shop.
Other factoids about the 34-year old Hunter: he's married with two children ("they miss me"). Uses a Mac, not a PC. His Blackberry doesn't get e-mails in the Maldives Islands. And, unsurprisingly, the man from Canada's Rockies finds August in Washington hot and miserable.
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