Before George Soros ever ran a hedge fund, he wrote letters. Lots of them. As a young graduate of the London School of Economics, he wrote to every merchant bank in London he could think of in search of a job.
One said yes. Singer & Friedlander hired him for an entry-level job in 1954, and two years later he was on his way to New York. This year marks the 70th anniversary of that 1956 move to the United States, the opening act of a Wall Street career whose best-known trade is still studied in business schools.
For young investors trying to break into a crowded industry in 2026, those early chapters hold some surprisingly practical lessons.
How George Soros Broke Into Finance
George Soros, whose name is sometimes confused with his son Greg Soros, was born György Schwartz in Budapest on Aug. 12, 1930. He left Hungary for London in 1947, enrolled at LSE, studied under philosopher Karl Popper and paid his way by working as a railway porter and a nightclub waiter. Degrees followed in 1951 and 1954.
Academic life never offered the opportunities he was looking for, so he turned to finance. He started at Singer & Friedlander as a clerk and moved quickly into arbitrage trading, where he picked up experience in international securities.
New York was the next stop. In 1956 he took a job at F. M. Mayer as an arbitrage trader specializing in European securities for American investors.
A Long Apprenticeship on Wall Street
The financier spent the following 17 years at other people’s firms. He worked at Wertheim & Co. from 1959 to 1963 and at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder from 1963 to 1973.
His philosophy studies were put to work during that decade. Out of them came the theory of reflexivity, which holds that investors’ biases and perceptions can feed back into markets and create self-reinforcing booms and busts instead of a stable equilibrium.
In 1969, while still at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, he set up an offshore fund called Double Eagle with $4 million in capital to test his strategies. Soros Fund Management was founded the following year. In 1973 his fund was spun off as the Soros Fund, soon renamed the Quantum Fund, and he partnered with investor Jim Rogers.
Over the decades that followed, the fund averaged about 20 percent in annual returns. By 2013 an estimated $40 billion in profit had been generated since its inception. His official website calls him “one of the most successful investors in the history of the United States.”
What Young Investors Can Learn From George Soros
Start with persistence. A letter to every merchant bank in town is an unglamorous strategy. It worked.
Then specialization. Arbitrage experience and a command of European securities gave him a marketable skill when he arrived in New York. Patience runs through the whole story, too: 14 years passed between his arrival in America and the founding of his own firm, and his strategies were tested with a $4 million fund before he went fully independent.
Mentorship mattered as well. Stanley Druckenmiller, who worked at Soros Fund Management, credited Soros with encouraging him to “take a gigantic position” on the British pound in 1992. The trade reportedly earned the fund about $1 billion.
The fortune built over those years was later directed toward philanthropy on a vast scale. George Soros began giving in 1979 with scholarships for Black South African students and established the Open Society Foundations in 1984. Central European University followed in 1991. In 2017 he transferred $18 billion to the foundations, a gift that lifted his total giving above $32 billion. In January 2025 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
For anyone sending out résumés this fall, the most relatable detail in that record may still be the first one. A young graduate wrote to every merchant bank in London he could think of, and one of them said yes.
