Pierre Andurand, oil trader

He’s near the end of a 90-minute training session at Urban Kings, a gym he owns on the edge of central London. The sweat flies off his face as he launches his 107-kilogram, 1.8-meter frame forward one last time before dropping, exhausted, to the mat.

The next morning, Andurand,40, is at his desk in the offices of his hedge fund, Andurand Capital Management LLP, not far from Harrods, the upmarket department store in Knightsbridge. He shows no ill effects from the previous day’s workout. He’s traded his plain black T-shirt and shorts for a dark-blue Ermenegildo Zegna suit and an open-necked shirt, his close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face completing the look of the man of finance that he is.

A preternatural calm in the office - two soothing 3.5-meter (11.5 feet) fish tanks, a meticulously tended Zen garden - barely hints at Andurand’s martial arts persona. He says kickboxing and money managing go hand in hand. “A good trader needs to be curious and experiment with things,” he says.

Andurand Capital, which started doing business on Feb. 1, 2013 provides its managing partner with an opportunity to salvage his reputation as one of London’s most talented oil traders after his previous - and now extinct - hedge-fund firm, BlueGold Capital Management LLP, lost 34% in 2011. As for kickboxing, Andurand has poured $30 million into the sport’s biggest promoter, Glory Sports International, in an attempt to turn it into a moneymaker. Andurand, who’s chairman of Glory Sports, sees it as more than a business proposition.

He’s already made his mark as the trader who called the top of the oil market in 2008. He’s got his Bugatti Veyron, the most expensive street-legal production car in the world (base price: $1.7 million). He’s got his model wife, Yevgenia Slyusarenko, whom he married in a lavish ceremony outside St. Petersburg in 2011 at one of Catherine I of Russia’s former palaces. In Glory Sports, he sees a legacy. “I know it looks like I’m a flashy guy, but I know I’m not,” he says. “I’d be very proud if Glory really took off, because it would be something that stays beyond me and then you create something real.” He’s got a way to go. Although Glory Sports is the undisputed leader in kickboxing, it’s a lightweight compared with rivals such as Ultimate Fighting Championship, which was created in 1993 and bought in 2011 by billionaire casino-heir brothers Frank Fertitta III and Lorenzo Fertitta. Glory Sports has 90 fighters under contract yet still hasn’t signed a major TV deal in the U.S. and offers pay-per-view only through its website. By contrast, UFC last year had more than 400 fighters under contract and produced 14 televised pay-per-view events, bringing in $500 million in annual sales. At London’s Wembley Arena in February 2013, UFC filled 10,000 seats. In March 2013, Glory drew just 3,800 fans to the ExCeL arena across town. Glory and UFC make boxing or Olympic-style wrestling look sanitized. Kickboxing under Glory rules is a combat sport that allows punching above the waist and kicking and kneeing pretty much anywhere apart from the groin. Kickboxers wear gloves on their hands and nothing on their feet. The sport doesn’t allow attacks with elbows or holding of any kind for more than three seconds. UFC - which belongs to a separate fighting discipline, mixed martial arts, or MMA - permits a more violent combination of stand-up fighting, wrestling and jujitsu that has inured audiences to chokeholds and the bloody consequences of an elbow to the face. Glory matches are fought at a more frenetic pace than most MMA fights. UFC contests, for example, often descend into floor-based tactical battles that for casual viewers can be difficult to appreciate unless they have a background in jujitsu or Greco-Roman wrestling.

Andurand started training in martial arts after graduating in 2000 from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris, one of France’s top business schools, with an admission rate of 4%. At the time, kickboxing was popular on the Continent. By 2012, kickboxing was almost out for the count worldwide. Dutch-British fighter Alistair Overeem, the biggest name in K-1, had defected to UFC, and other stars, including Moroccan-Dutch Badr Hari, were also leaving the sport. When Andurand speaks about martial arts, his eyes light up in a way that doesn’t happen when he talks about trading. “I think good kickboxing fights are the most exciting to watch,” he says in accented English. “My bet is that most of the fans will agree with me.” Having seen kickboxing on its knees and possessing the means to pump money into the sport, he decided to act. “It was so sad to see the sport in the shape it was, and I wanted to do something about it,” he says. “Kickboxing deserves to become mainstream, but nobody ever tried to put the right structure and capital behind it to make it big.” To that end, Andurand, together with Kuala Lumpur-based sports marketing agency Total Sports Asia and a few other investors, founded Glory Sports, which is based in Singapore. Glory Sports is a privately held company, and Andurand won’t disclose details of its accounts or its inner workings. Through its acquisition of a few European kickboxing outfits such as Amsterdam-based It’s Showtime, Glory Sports now has “most if not all the best kickboxers under its roof.” The money he has invested has mostly been swallowed up by the deals. Under Andurand, Glory Sports has adopted some UFC-style features, most obviously the practice of signing fighters directly to the company to guarantee the best matchups. In traditional boxing, of the sort that made Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson household names, fighters sign with a management company and can choose to fight for championship belts from any of several boxing associations. As a result, the best and most popular boxers often don’t get a chance to fight each other. Andurand says he expects Japan to be Glory Sports’ №2 market. Japan is the birthplace of martial arts from karate to jujitsu, and it’s the former home not only of K-1 but also of Pride Fighting Championships, a forerunner to UFC. K-1 regularly attracted live crowds of 50,000-plus during its peak from 1997 to 2005.

After graduating from business school, Andurand began his foray into martial arts with Shaolin wushu, a fighting style said to have grown out of a fifth-century Buddhist monastery in China’s Henan province. He also trained in capoeira, a Brazilian fighting technique, before discovering Muay Thai, a form of kickboxing practiced in Thailand that includes elbow blows, clinches and knee strikes. His training culminated in a heavyweight bout in 2007 that was cut short by a dislocated shoulder. Another injury, this time to his knee, combined with the realization that black eyes aren’t a good look for a fund manager, persuaded him in recent years to stick to hitting pads, not people.

All the while, Andurand was making a name for himself as an oil trader. He launched his career in 2000, when he went to work in Singapore at J. Aron & Co., a unit of Goldman Sachs Group. Remaining in Singapore, he took a job at Bank of America and then at Geneva-based Vitol, the world’s largest oil-trading company. In 2004, he moved to London as a partner for Vitol. Four years later, he co-founded BlueGold.

It’s the Zen side of martial arts that Andurand displays on the trading floor, says Stephen Jen, a former foreign-exchange trader at BlueGold. “He may be the calmest risk taker I’ve seen,” Jen says. “Oil is a relatively volatile financial product, so you have to see the sometimes violent daily swings as noise. He’s really good at putting on a position early and sitting through the volatility.” Andurand’s reputation as an oil trader was such that, in 2010, BlueGold raised the fees it charged new investors to 2.5% of assets and 25% of profits, above the industry norm of 2% and 20%, respectively. His biggest year was 2008, when he correctly wagered that Brent crude had peaked at a record $147.50 a barrel in July. BlueGold raked in revenue as the benchmark contract tumbled 78% during the next five months. Andurand’s firm was №12 in the Bloomberg Markets ranking of the world’s most profitable hedge funds that year and №13 in 2009. “He made us a lot of money,” says Gabriel Garcin, a portfolio manager at Paris-based Europanel Research & Alternative Asset Management, a $550 million fund-of-hedge-funds firm. “When he became too big, we took the decision to redeem. We had some reservations about the way he wanted to diversify his portfolio through equities and other types of commodities, and not only the oil markets, which are his edge.”Assets under management at BlueGold slid from $2.4 billion in early 2011 to $1 billion by the time it fell apart in April 2012. BlueGold’s problems began in May 2011 when crude prices dropped almost 10% after Andurand had bet they would rise. Because of the size of BlueGold’s fund, it was difficult to adjust quickly, and attempts to control the damage pushed him further into the hole. At the same time, Andurand’s relationship with his co-founder, Dennis Crema, deteriorated. Andurand keeps any lingering bitterness to himself.

With Andurand Capital, the celebrated trader is getting back to basics. His new firm will charge investors the going rate of 2 and 20. To honor investors who stayed with BlueGold until the end, he says he’ll charge them no performance fees until they’ve recouped any previous losses. Andurand Capital’s focus will be mainly on oil, along with some other commodities and foreign exchange.

Reflecting on his trading returns, Andurand says: “I had such a good run for so many years, I thought, why doesn’t everybody do that? Then you take a big slap and you remember why. No one does well all the time.” He says he knows that he’ll take a few hits in the markets during the coming months and years - just as he will, no doubt, as he tries to turn Glory into his legacy.

In 2013, the Andurand Commodities Fund finished the year as one of the best performing commodities hedge funds with a 25% return. In 2014, it generated a 38% return net of all fees by correctly forecasting the sharp decline in crude oil prices. The fund achieved a return of 47% for investors who transferred their money from BlueGold, whose investments are now back above the previous fund’s high water mark, which was honoured by Andurand Capital. In September 2016, Glory Sports International announced a Series B financing round, with Yao Capital acquiring a significant strategic stake in the company.