When Vic died Aug. 4, 2026, I was halfway through “The Walking Drum,” a Louis l’Amour book set in the Middle Ages. It’s about a man who repeatedly started from zero, a pioneering trader, a scholar and explorer with vast intellectual curiosity, witty in conversation, a man of respect and great courage, a superior athlete, and a magnet for ladies — whom he always sought to protect.
That was Victor Niederhoffer.
Vic loved heroes and heroic deeds. He loved to read the lives of scientists, inventors, Western cowboys. He collected thousands of letters written by heroes, scientists, judges, authors, composers, and the Founding Fathers. His collection of fabulous antique silver trophies had its own book when he sold it at Sotheby’s.
His life was large and he made the world greater. His circle encompassed hundreds of famous, witty, brilliant people: entrepreneurs, inventors, traders, professors, philosophers. On his death, tributes flowed in from people he had mentored.
He had a gift of making lasting friendships at a first meeting. It was partly his confidence — the same aplomb that let him ride out huge losses and get back in the waves. And along with his achievements, he also had a personal warmth and humor that made him incredibly charismatic.
He was welcomed by brilliant academics at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and NYU; but he was no snob. He genuinely liked people. After wandering through the Botanical Garden, he liked to stop off at the handball courts in the Bronx ghetto for a pickup game. He departed with new friends, who were likely to receive Vic’s tennis racquet as a gift.
Drivers, waiters, caretakers, and housekeepers loved him.
The Walled Garden
He used to say his office was the New York Botanical Garden. He went there often in search of trading insights.
One of our first meetings after I met him in 1999 was at the garden. I was late because the first taxi driver I found refused to go to the Bronx. Vic waited. He always did.
We walked among flower beds, and he knelt to inhale their fragrance. Ah, I thought. This is a man in touch with the real world.
As we strolled under the huge trees in the dying afternoon, he began to call, “Shimek! Shimek!”
As with most of what he said in those first days, I had no idea what he was talking about. Who was Shimek?
Gradually, the day dies away. The sun goes out like a candle. The sounds that filled the day die away. There’s hardly a living soul on the street. In the windows of the little houses shine the little flanes of the holiday candles. A strange and holy stillness surrounds us, Buzzie and me, and we feel ourselves inextricably fused with the festive stillness.
“Shimek! Shimek?”
For the third time now Mama is calling me to go to shul. Don’t I know that I have to go to shul? But I’ll sit here just a minute more. A minute, and no more. — Sholom Aleichem, The Song of Songs
He loved trees both physically and for inspiration. He developed theories of stock price movements based on their habits of growth and branching.
He was also fascinated by octopuses and turkeys and elephants. He distilled the tastiest bits and regaled dinner partners with tales of their astonishing qualities and lessons for us humans.
One of his most famous strategies was based on the tendency of rampaging elephants to return along the same path. He found this in a book entitled “LoBagola: An African Savage’s Own Story” by one Bata LoBagola.
An early Wall Street Journal profile of Victor was illustrated with a photo of LoBagola captioned “Victor Niederhoffer,” supplied by pranksters on his staff.
It later turned out that LoBagola himself was a fraud. The author was a black Jewish American, Joseph Howard Lee, born in Baltimore.
When I was still the North American stock market team leader at Bloomberg, I called him for a quote. He compared the market to Modoc. I searched for Biblical references. Did he mean Moloch, the bloodthirsty god who demanded child sacrifice? Or Moab? Eventually I asked, and learned that Modoc was the greatest elephant who ever lived and that there was a book about him.
My shelves became full of books Victor liked. Gradually, I began to make some sense of him and to understand the world he dominated.
I was already a free-market person, having read Hayek and Solzhenitsyn, and I had studied under the conservative maven M. Stanton Evans.
Under Vic’s influence, I read Ayn Rand and Louis l’Amour. I began devouring textbooks on statistics, psychology, biology, and geology.
We regularly visited bookstores and invariably returned with great stacks.
One day, during a trip to the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side, he decided that I needed the complete Oxford English Dictionary. It was delivered, about 20 volumes of it, to my desk at Bloomberg.
At the time, he was still smarting from his 1997 disaster in the Thai stock market. The first time he called, it was to ask me about an error I had unintentionally inserted into a story. He invited me to “a meeting of eagles” at his Junto. Afterward, he took me to La Goulue on Madison Avenue. I wondered to myself how he could afford such a fancy place when he was broke.
He walked me home, limping badly. (A hip replacement was in the future.) He confided that he had been trading the German bund. He asked if he could use my phone. I told him there was a pay phone on the corner.
I was hoping to make him my source. I had bought his book, “The Education of a Speculator” in 1997, and found him sympathetic, particularly because he appreciated music and had a fine sense of humor. Before I finished the book, his fund blew up. I put it down.
Vic began to show me the city as only a born New Yorker could. The Oyster Bar. His family’s modest old house in Brighton Beach. Coney Island. The silver dealers at the Second Avenue antiques market. Barney Greengrass. The Broadway sheet music store, now sadly closed.
One day, he told me that he had made a million dollars that day.
Soaring up to the clouds and even above the clouds with Buzzie by means of Kabbala and flying far away across the ocean with her — that was one of my favorite dreams. There, across the ocean, begins the land of the dwarfs who are descendants of the mighty warriors of King David’s time. These dwarfs are good-nature little folk. They live only on candies and almond milk, they play little panpipes all day long, and they all dance round together. They fear nothing and are fond of guests. If anyone comes to visit, they wine and dine him and give him the most expensive garments and loads of gold and silver vessels. And before he leaves, the dwarfs stuff his pockets with diamonds and precious gems. — Sholom Aleichem, The Song of Songs
I resigned from Bloomberg at the beginning of 2000 in a dispute over whether my new source and friend Victor was trying to sway the markets through me. The idea was absurd. Did NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell sway interest rates through her husband, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan?
Vic encouraged me to quit. He encouraged me to aim higher.
A New Kind of Financial News
In those days, the only newswriter who knew anything about markets was James Cramer, a former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reporter turned trader. It was Cramer who gave me my first job as an independent columnist.
I immediately proposed that Vic be my co-author. Cramer agreed, and we began our collaboration.
We lasted about two months. We resigned after the columns editor refused to let us mention the great Victorian scientist and explorer Francis Galton, one of Vic’s heroes.
But we were on to something. The next month, I got a call from Jon Markman, editor of MSNBC Money, and “The Speculator” was born.
Our columns at The Street had attracted lots of email. A reader, James Goldcamp, set up a mail list for us so that everybody could communicate. The Spec List is still going today, 26 years later, and is the basis for a website, Daily Speculations, an online forum which topped 10,000 readers at its peak and was regularly quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
Over the next few years, we collaborated on hundreds of columns. I was the writer-editor half, sort of an AI assistant, except I was better than that. He supplied inspiration, an unerring instinct for story, and statistical analysis, fortified with outrageous humor.
No one had ever read anything like them.
Every one of our stories was backed by data and statistically tested. Could quantitative analysis be entertaining? We gave it our best shot.
We wrote Alan Greenspan a letter suggesting that he resign as Fed Chairman. We included a pair of basketball shoes and recommended that he play for the Knicks instead.
We wrote about trading lessons drawn from “The Racing Maxims & Methods of Pittsburg Phil,” a legendary 19th century racing handicapper, and Robert Bacon’s “Secrets of Professional Turf Betting.” The price of Bacon’s book soared online.
I interviewed Alan Abelson at Barron’s and wrote a snarky column on how he had remained bearish during the entire tech-driven bull market of the ‘90s.
We ran contests for readers and awarded the winners with canes that I found in an old shop in the Garment District, to be used for hobbling down to Wall Street after crashes. The idea came from an account by Henry Clews, whose vivid histories of 19th-century life on Wall Street provided endless entertainment:
But few gain sufficient experience in Wall Street to command success until they reach that period of life in which they have one foot in the grave. When this time comes these old veterans of the Street usually spend long intervals of repose at their comfortable homes, and in times of panic, which recur sometimes oftener than once a year, these old fellows will be seen in Wall Street, hobbling down on their canes to their brokers’ office.
Then they always buy good stocks to the extent of their bank balances, which have been permitted to accumulate for just such an emergency. The panic usually rages until enough of these cash purchases of stock is made to afford a big “rake in.” When the panic has spent its force, these old fellows, who have been resting judiciously on their oars in expectation of the inevitable event, which usually returns with the regularity of the seasons, quickly realize, deposit their profits with their bankers, or the overplus thereof, after purchasing more real estate that is on the upgrade, for permanent investment, and retire for another season to the quietude of their splendid homes and the bosoms of their happy families.
Vic adored Broadway musicals and Gilbert & Sullivan and could quote them by heart. His writing and conversation — even his trading strategies — drew on the lyrics as others use proverbs or poetry.
One of my first assignments was to write lyrics about trading to a Broadway song, “Just In Time.”
Just in time, stocks rallied just in time…
I am a classically trained pianist, and knew little of the Broadway genre. But eventually Vic had only to toss off an idea and I could create lyrics.
We performed these songs for financial audiences around the world, with me at the piano accompanying a professional singer, all interspersed with scholarly points from Vic. It was another thing that no one had seen before. (I once studied with pianist Leonid Hambro, who had served as Victor Borge’s straight-man pianist, so the idea wasn’t completely foreign.).
All this writing and fun went on right in the middle of a very active trading business. It was a type of journalism practiced by Gerald Loeb, Henry Clews, and the other old-time greats, who knew the market because they traded it and sought inside knowledge.
That is considered a conflict of interest today. I think that’s unfortunate. The average financial journalist has little idea about what goes on behind the scenes, beyond pat quotes from interested parties, often about what amounts to Brownian motion, delivered to the innocent journalist and thence the public.
The trading room was a large space built over a garage. Banks of windows looked out on an oak forest and a clay tennis court. Trading days were punctuated by tennis games. If Vic wanted a price, he would lob a tennis ball at a window. Remarkably, none of the windows ever broke; no “Lady I Did It” moments.
One new hire was stunned when Vic climbed up on a desk and did a silent vaudeville routine as his indoctrination to the firm.
It was better than the Marx Brothers.
We began throwing big summer parties, for readers and others. The first one, in 2000, drew maybe a dozen and a half people. The gatherings grew exponentially each year. Eventually, more than 100 showed up, coming from points as far away as Hawaii, Singapore, England, Florida, and the British Virgin Islands.
The parties lasted for a few days and included excursions to Vic’s favorite haunts. The itinerary might include a baseball game, or a trip to Vic’s old playing grounds in Brighton Beach to watch him challenge the old timers at handball, or to one of New York’s great botanical gardens. Once we went to the races, guided by our friends Lila Kerns and Kevin Depew, editors of the Racing Form. At the conclusion, there might be a grand dinner at the old Wall Street traders’ hangout, Delmonico’s, concluding with a performance of — what else? — Spec songs.
Most of all, the visitors came to attend a watch Vic trade. Invariably, a summer thunderstorm cut off the power, or Vic’s positions would be losing money.
Vic and Squash
When Vic entered Harvard at age 16, anti-Jewish discrimination was still evident. He felt — or was made to feel — uncomfortable. He lacked basic WASP skills such as how to tie a tie.
He took refuge on the squash courts, where under the guidance of the legendary Jack Barnaby he quickly began winning competitions. Experts on the game regard him as among the top hardball players of all time, maybe the top.
His revenge was a carefully cultivated outward eccentricity. He wore tennis shoes everywhere. He never wore an overcoat. He’d show up in seersucker in the dead of winter. For a time, he wore socks on his hands. Whatever he ate invariably ended up on his shirt or his lap. He didn’t care. And he never, never wore a tie.
He was studying for his PhD at the University of Chicago when an important squash tournament was held in the city. The local squash club let him practice there, but refused him a membership, despite his national championships. He was convinced it was because he was Jewish.
He quit the game for five years in protest. I only heard the story when his uncle Howie told it one evening over dinner at the Harvard Club. Vic had become reticent about it, although he loved to mock the horror of members of the fanciest club in Manhattan when they looked out of the window of their elaborate building and saw a Jew walking down the street.
To confound the WASPs, he loved wearing old-money Ralph Lauren colors. He wore flamingo-pink pants, yellow polo shirts, pink, yellow, or purple blazers, powder blue cashmere sweaters, lavender button-downs, and panama hats.
Ironically, Ralph Lauren was Jewish, born Ralph Lifshitz to parents who fled Belarus. A marketing executive at the company was Vic’s friend and investor, and he invited us to join the Old Oaks Country Club, a very fancy place in Westchester built by Jews excluded from Manhattan’s clubs.
Vic once told me that he had become convinced that he should get others before they got him. (He loved Mario Puzo’s books and read them all.)
As with so many other American Jews, his brilliance overcame all else. Although the Harvard years had been challenging, he came away with an extensive network of powerful friends. It seemed to me that wherever we traveled, we would meet with a Jewish trading honcho or professor who had played handball in Brighton Beach.
The Broadway songs he loved were pure Jewish culture, delivered with a smile to a WASP America that barely tolerated Jews.
Despite his distinguished Jewish lineage, Vic never attended synagogue. As a child, he had gone with his parents, but they sneakily listened to the Brooklyn Dodgers game on the radio. Each year, a giant Christmas tree stood in the living room at his house.
Turning Point
In 2002, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent months of chemotherapy. During that time, we were supposed to be finishing our book, Practical Speculation, for Wiley & Sons. I did my best, but he was not at full power. I made the deadline. The book was published in February 2003 and was well reviewed. Active Trader magazine called it “the best trading book of the young millennium.”
Vic made a full recovery. Shortly afterward, he moved in with me.
For the next five years, we lived together in Sutton Place, at the edge of the East River.
He began to manage money for investors again, making steady gains that trounced the competition. His return, and our columns, brought talented people from all corners who wanted to trade with him. His old partner, Steve Wisdom, returned to run the shop. Brilliant programmers and PhDs joined up. The fund quickly grew to $300 million.
In 2003, we stopped writing so he could concentrate fully on the fund. I felt a bit lost, but I focused on being a good partner.
Despite his affability, his playfulness, and his carefully nurtured eccentricities, he had iron discipline. He rose early. He always kept one eye on the market, and could tell the time of day without looking at a clock.
His attitude toward loss also had iron in it. For him, everything zeroed out at the close, and tomorrow was another day. He took things one day at a time and refused to brood.
He ran multiple analytical scenarios throughout the day based on patterns and relationships among markets.
When the futures market closed at 4:15 pm, he quietly read.
Most of the time, he didn’t let anything bother him. But he smoldered if anyone wrote an unfavorable article.
When trading had not gone well, we ate at the diner. If trading had gone well, we had a magnificent fish dinner at the Four Seasons. If trading had been exceptional, we walked to the Manhattan Arts & Antiques Center to buy me a piece of jewelry.
After dinner, he bought me flowers. He also brought dozens of paintings. Many were originals of old magazine illustrations — humorous, romantic, charming. So there was always color in our apartment.
He truly enjoyed good food. Despite his eccentricities in dress, he was heartily welcomed wherever he went. He knew the names of all of the waiters at Le Bernardin and the Four Seasons.
He never drank, except for a glass of Sauterne with dinner, a pleasure he had acquired from his Harvard squash coach, Jack Barnaby, who introduced his players to fine dining when they went on the road.
He sent me on dozens of trips. I saw Japan, China, Singapore, Cambodia, and Russia, often meeting up with friends from our Spec List. I rode a train from Capetown to Botswana. I saw the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain. I took a train ride through the American West.
The most mind-opening trip of all was a private jet tour that tracked the path of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, organized by Stanford and guided by Janet Browne, Darwin’s eminent biographer. We saw the cliffs in Uruguay where Darwin had found ancient sea creatures. I took home a fossil shell. We then traveled to Argentina, Patagonia, Easter Island, the Solomon Islands, Mauretania, Cape Verde, and finally to the London museum to view his finds.
One year, he decided we should learn the Lindy Hop. Accordingly, we took weekly lessons from a former Israeli commando who ran a studio in the West Village..
We visited Venice, but our trip was cut short by the New Orleans flood. There we were in a city sinking beneath the sea, flying home to keep his fund from going under water because of a Louisiana flood.
Another year, he wanted to attend the New Year’s Eve Waltz in Vienna. We spent months learning the waltz. And when the evening arrived, we ascended the magnificent steps in a splendid imperial castle. And danced and danced and danced.
We continued performing for hedge fund conferences and finance students. We had performances in Vienna, London, Geneva, Yale, and Harvard.
In 2006, we welcomed our son, Aubrey.
But tremors had begun in the market and in our lives.
Time of Troubles
In 2007, the Chicago market tripled margin requirements — a move aimed squarely at Victor, who held a massive position. Over the next few months, the firm gradually liquidated. By the beginning of 2008, the fund had closed. And so had our idyllic chapter together.
Love never ends, despite partings and heartaches. Vic continued to support me for the next 19 years. When I started a business, he was my backer. He financed my growing gardening obsession, and continued to send me on trips.
I never stopped enjoying his company. We focused on Aubrey. His care for Aubrey was clear and real, every day.
After a stroke in 2017, his mobility gradually diminished. But in typical Victor style, he refused to give up. He had beat the legendary Sharif Khan to win the 1975 North American Open despite a sprained ankle. Now he was barely able to walk without falling. Still, he continued to hop trains and planes, and continued inviting me to dinner. When Aubrey was accepted at UC Berkeley in 2024, Vic went to see him. He went on a marathon tour to Asia with Aubrey.
For his 80th birthday, he threw a big party for old friends and family. He asked me to play the piano accompaniment to a song from Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, “Someone in a Tree,” describing an historic meeting between American and Japanese officials surreptitiously observed by a 10-year-old boy.
The vocal and piano parts are both difficult, inexorably gathering momentum until the end. The only person willing to take it on was Vic’s brother, Roy. With only one run-through, he sang it better than the professionals.
OLD MAN: Pardon me, I was there.
RECITER: You were where?
OLD MAN: At the treaty house.
RECITER: At the treaty house?
OLD MAN: There was a tree ?
RECITER: Which was where?
OLD MAN: Very near.
RECITER: Over here?
OLD MAN: Maybe over there, but there were trees then, everywhere. May I show you?
RECITER: If you please.
OLD MAN: There were trees, then, everywhere.
RECITER: But you were there.
OLD MAN: And I was there! Let me show you.
RECITER: If you please.
OLD MAN (tries to climb) I was younger then. (tries again) I was good at climbing trees. I was younger then. I saw everything! I was hidden all the time. It was easier to climb. I was younger then. I saw everything. Where they came and where they went. I was part of the event. I was someone in a tree! (tries once more) I was younger then!
(Suddenly, a Young Boy appears, scurries across the stage, and up the tree.)
BOY: (to the Old Man) Tell him what I see!
OLD MAN: I am in a tree. I am ten. I am in a tree.
BOY: I was younger then.
OLD MAN: In between the eaves I can see. (to the Boy) Tell me what I see. (to the REciter) I was only ten.
BOY: I see men and matting. Some are old, some chatting.
OLD MAN: If it happened, I was there!
BOTH: I saw/see everything!
OLD MAN: I was someone in a tree.
Why that song? I think he wanted to tell us that when everything has been lost, when people think you are of little consequence, when you are old and the world is fading you into the past, it’s not time to stay silent. We are all important.
On August 3, 2026, I was the last friend to visit him. I drove up from my house in Greenwich that afternoon, bringing chicken broth.
At 2:30 a.m. the next morning, he took his last breath, his beautiful daughter Katie holding his hand.
In that beautiful first chapter of Sholom Aleichem’s “Song of Songs,” that story of unfulfilled love that Vic quoted from, Buzzie urges Shimek to leave. Their day outside in the sunshine is over, and Passover Eve is fading to twilight. They are only children, “together, not even twenty.”
“Shimek! It’s you they are calling. You! Go, go. It’s time! Go!”
And I imagine that I hear her saying to me in the language of the Song of Songs: Make haste, my beloved — run, my darling, and be swift as a gazelle — quick as a deer or a young stag on the mountains of spices.
⥈
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Essay on Friendship”
Laurel this so vividly captures the larger than life person that he was and your incredibly rich relationship. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Thank you for writing and sharing this with us. Long life Laurel