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Richard Farleigh is described by the BBC as an Australian multi-millionaire “who has possibly invested in more new UK companies than any other investor in Britain… He first made his millions trading the world’s financial markets” |
Those who watch the Dragons’ Den series on BBC TV will have noticed that one of the new panel of inquisitors has an impressive background of trading in the financial markets. The premise of the programme is that would-be entrepreneurs go cap in hand to a panel of successful businessmen and a token woman – the dragons – to secure funding to get the next best thing off the ground. Richard Farleigh, the new panellist, is described by the BBC as an Australian multi-millionaire “who has possibly invested in more new UK companies than any other investor in Britain… He first made his millions trading the world’s financial markets”.
All very true. Farleigh, who now lives in Monte Carlo, has a rags-to-riches story to tell. He cut his financial teeth trading FX options for Bankers Trust in Sydney in the 1980s. In those days, Bankers had a fearsome reputation and the Sydney operation, which was run completely separately from the firm’s New York head office, was no different.
Farleigh is possibly the most successful of a clutch of traders who emerged from down under at that time, including his former colleague at Bankers, Ivan Ritossa, now head of foreign exchange at Barclays, and Jack Jeffery, chief executive of EBS. In fact, Jeffery looks remarkably like Farleigh, but is apparently not only unrelated, he has never even met him.
Despite the popularity of the series, one veteran FX option trader is not that impressed. “That programme is fundamentally flawed,” he rants. “They should have people who are investing a meaningful proportion of their fortune, not people who invest less than a thousandth of their worth. If the guy puts in £50,000 and he is worth £500 million, he is staking one-ten-thousandth of his worth. I regularly have a few hundred quid on a dog or a horse or a football game and that is a much bigger percentage of my worth.”
But even if Farleigh is only putting in what for him is beer money, he should still be applauded. Some of his fellow panellists are, to put it mildly, the sort of people who would have been smacked over the head in most FX dealing rooms back in the 1980s. His restraint, so far, has been admirable.
