T. Boone Pickens isn’t your average hedge fund manager. He’s an oilman turned fund manager. Instead of taking risks in the oil fields, he now takes risks in financial markets. His investment strategy is quite straightforward. He forecasts the direction of energy markets and then makes outsized bets in mostly futures and derivatives markets. Depending on his call, he might go long or short. Since he makes directional bets, sometimes his losses are staggering. In 1997, he started a commodities fund which eventually lost 90 percent in less than 2 years.

Katherine Burton profiled Boone Pickens in her book Hedge Hunters. Boone Pickens’ most memorable quote from the book is "Most of my ideas work, but the timing gets screwed up every once in a while". Here is an excerpt from the book about Boone Pickens’ performance until 2008:

His energy stock hedge funds, which invest 90 percent in equities and 10 percent in commodities, averaged returns of about 38 percent a year through mid-2007 since starting in August 2001. His oil and gas commodities fund distributed about $2.8 billion to investors since he started it in 1997. About $1.6 billion of the $4.3 billion BP Capital manages is Pickens’s personal fortune. New clients pay a 1.75 percent management fee and 30 percent of any profit.”