Phil Duff had a three-decade hot streak. He earned degrees from Harvard University and MIT and then skipped through the ranks at investment bank Morgan Stanley, becoming chief financial officer in 1994, when he was 36. Hedge fund phenom Julian Robertson hired him four...

For 20 years, Don Brownstein taught philosophy at the University of Kansas. He specialized in metaphysics, which examines the character of reality itself. In a photo from his teaching days, he looks like a young Karl Marx, with a bushy...

Charles Payson Coleman III, known as Chase, is as close as one gets to American aristocracy. He is the heir to a fortune, and he’s made his own....

Andy Beal’s road to becoming a billionaire, doing deals with the likes of Carl Icahn and Donald Trump, runs straight through the slums of Newark, New Jersey....

Prescient bets against the stock market have helped endowment manager Alice Handy regularly beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Handy, who manages money for Smith, Barnard and Middlebury colleges at a firm she founded called Investure LLC, has also...

Media baron Robert F.X. Sillerman had a great run until he tried to break into real estate with Elvis Presley....

The subprime crisis that’s caused so much trauma for hedge funds and investment banks has brought only good news for John Paulson. He’s the manager of more than $7 billion in hedge fund money keyed to mortgage credit. Paulson started warning his investors...

Tom Hudson and his pirates had a blunt message for Canadian ski-resort owner Intrawest Corp.: “Surrender the Booty.” It was March 2006, and Hudson, who runs a hedge fund firm called Pirate Capital LLC, spied treasure at Vancouver-based Intrawest. Its...

One day in Chicago, Dave Bigg is about to drink a few beers with his buddies and divvy up Cubs baseball tickets when his cell phone rings. It’s the doctor, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Bigg’s biopsy looks...