Victor Niederhoffer (born December 10, 1943)[1] is an American hedge fund manager, champion squash player, bestselling author and statistician.

His paternal grandfather Martin (Martie), an accountant and court interpreter, married Birdie (née Kuminsky) in 1916.

[6][7][8][9][2][3] Also he taught at Hofstra University, Brooklyn College, New York University, Queens College, and the New York City Police Academy, authored several books on the police and criminology including Behind the Shield, The Ambivalent Force, The Gang, and The Police Family: From Station House to Ranch House (co-authored with his wife), and was awarded the President's Medal of John Jay College for his achievements in criminal justice.

[7][10] His mother, Elaine (née Eisenberg) Niederhoffer (1925–2006), was an English teacher, author, and editor who had descended from a long line of rabbis.

Niederhoffer pioneered a mass marketing approach in investment banking and did a large volume of small deals at this firm.

[15] As an academic at Berkeley in the 1960s, Niederhoffer wrote a number of papers on anomalies in stock market behavior.

[19] Niederhoffer decided to sell put options on Thai bank stocks to collect premium (being effectively long these stocks), which had fallen heavily in the Asian financial crisis, his bet being that the Thai government would not allow these companies to go out of business.

On October 27, 1997, losses resulting from this investment, combined with a 554-point (7.2%) single-day decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the eighth[20] largest point decline to date in index history), forced Niederhoffer Investments to close its doors.

[21] Since closing down his fund in 1997, he began trading for his own account again in 1998, after mortgaging his house and selling his antique silver collection.

Niederhoffer employs proprietary computer programs that purports to predict short-term moves using multivariate time series analysis.

[23][24] From 2000 to 2003, Niederhoffer co-wrote with financial writer Laurel Kenner a weekly column on the markets for CNBC MoneyCentral.