The macroeconomics of John Maynard Keynes continue to dominate the global economic policy debate to this day. But many have forgotten that the great intellectual was also one of the most active investors of his era.

He made and lost several fortunes, for himself, his friends, his college (King’s, Cambridge) and for City institutions that he chaired or founded. In some respects, he was an early hedge fund investor, first in macro in the 1920s and then in equities in the 1930s. He ended as one of the most successful investors of the first half of the last century, but along the way he learnt many lessons that resonate to this day.

His investment activities really started in the early 1920s, when he became convinced that the currencies of the economies devastated by the first world war (Germany, France and Italy) would soon collapse as inflation took hold. These positions soon made money, and an overconfident Keynes proclaimed that with “a little extra knowledge and experience of a special kind”, the money “simply comes rolling in”.