Meet The New Billionaire Behind Kazakhstan’s Surprisingly Hot Brokerage

Meet The New Billionaire Behind Kazakhstan’s Surprisingly Hot Brokerage

Timur Turlov has made a fortune tied to the stock market. But when the usually stoic Russian native is asked his thoughts about trading shares in GameStop, the video game retailer made red hot by Reddit day traders? He smiles, then rolls his eyes. "It's too volatile. It's bad for business in the long term." The 33-year-old's business is selling stocks to retail investors“”an activity that has made him incredibly wealthy. Shares of his Nasdaq-listed brokerage firm, Freedom Holding, rose a meteoric 200% in the year through early March, and enough to make Turlov a newcomer to Forbes' list of the World's Billionaires, ranked No. 1, 517, with an estimated net worth of $2. 1 billion. Turlov owns 72% of Freedom Holding, which is headquartered in Almaty, Kazakhstan. It had some 200, 000 customers and revenues of $122 million in the year through March 2020. Freedom Holding“”which has seven Freedom Finance subsidiaries sprinkled across Europe, Central Asia and the U. S.“”is somewhat like Charles Schwab or other platforms that give everyday people access to invest in the stock market, except it's aimed at providing citizens of the former Soviet bloc investment opportunities in U. S. stocks and IPOs as well