Tudor Bond Trader Phillips Has Lost $140 Million in April

(Bloomberg) — Tudor Investment Corp. trader Alexander Phillips lost about $140 million in April through earlier this week as President Donald Trump’s tariff barrage hammered financial markets, including US Treasuries.

The mark-to-market losses on Phillips’ trading book erased his pre-April gains for 2025, and he was down by about $80 million for the year as of earlier this week, according to people familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified discussing private details.

He remains at the firm, working to recoup his losses.

“While markets have been volatile, Alex Phillips has not been stopped out and continues to actively trade and manage his portfolio,” a representative for Tudor said in a statement.

While the April losses aren’t huge in the context of a firm that manages $16 billion, the speed of Phillips’ turnaround shows how many traders are having trouble navigating the recent volatility.

Long-term bond yields surged after Trump unveiled widespread, punitive tariffs intended to re-shape world trade last week, plans that have sent financial markets into a tailspin. The Treasury market, typically a haven, has been caught up in the crisis. That’s prompted a range of theories as to the driving forces, from foreign governments selling US debt to hedge funds unwinding highly leveraged trades.

It’s not exactly clear which trades triggered Phillips’ losses. His trading expertise includes highly leveraged bond basis trades that have stoked fears this week of a March 2020-like situation that had spurred the Federal Reserve to intervene to normalize the Treasury market. 

Some of the largest hedge funds employ the so-called basis trade, betting on price differences between cash Treasuries and futures. Traders typically borrow heavily in order to exploit the tiny gap, often 50 to 100 times the capital invested. The popularity of the highly profitable trade has ballooned, with recent estimates putting the amount staked on such bets at about $1 trillion — about double the amount five years ago.

Before joining Tudor, Phillips worked at ExodusPoint Capital Management and Millennium Management, two of the hedge funds highly active in the bond basis trades led, respectively, by veteran traders Jonathan Hoffman and John Bonello.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com