Guy Hands began his career in Eurobond trading at Goldman Sachs in the early 1980s. He made his name at Nomura in the 1990s with the pioneering securitization deals of its Principal Finance Group.
 |
Now he is head of Terra Firma, the leading private equity firm that has invested €17 billion in 34 businesses since 1994, with an aggregate enterprise value of over €48 billion. His earlier focus on securitization came about almost by accident. He did some individual credit trades as early as 1984: floating-rate note securitizations and a number of other collateralized bond obligations. “1989 was the first year that I lost money. I had made money for six years,” he recalls. “In my review in 1988, my boss said: ‘You haven’t lost money, so you haven’t taken enough risk.
