Hedge Fund Superstar Pierre Andurand Sets His Sights On Clean Energy After 154% Gain

Hedge Fund Superstar Pierre Andurand Sets His Sights On Clean Energy After 154% Gain

Last February, commodities trader Pierre Andurand was sitting at a dinner in London with some of the oil market's biggest players. It was International Petroleum Week, a gathering of executives and market participants, and Coronavirus was spreading like wildfire through Asia and Europe.

Andurand had a dire prediction for his peers: Oil could trade at negative prices if the world entered lockdowns as Covid-19 spread further.

He laid out why the spread of the virus would quickly exhaust hospital beds, forcing governments worldwide to enact stringent lockdowns. Such restrictions, however, would sap some $20 billion a day in oil demand worldwide due to plunging orders for jet fuel and commercial and passenger transport. The ensuing glut of supply, he predicted, would quickly overwhelm storage capacity at hubs like Cushing, Oklahoma, creating an almost existential problem for anyone long the commodity and taking delivery.  

For weeks, Andurand, a French-born mathematician with a masters degree in mathematical and theoretical physics from Oxford University, had been applying his rigorous analysis of data“”normally used to spot trends in financial markets“”to Covid studies published in journals like The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. As he parsed the studies, he concluded that the medical community was