We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Stanley Druckenmiller, chairman and CEO of Duquesne Family Office, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, researched by the MOI Global team from the investor’s own talks and interviews. We make these programs so that members can learn how a great investor thinks and works, through the decisions he made and what he said about them at the time. Your feedback on what was useful, and on which investors to cover next, shapes what we produce. We start with who he is:
Stanley Druckenmiller graduated from Bowdoin in 1975 and joined the research department of Pittsburgh National Bank in 1976. In 1978 his mentor there, Speros Drelles, made him director of research, and the bank later made him chief investment officer. In February 1981 he started Duquesne Capital Management. In 1988 he joined Soros Fund Management to run the Quantum Fund, while still running Duquesne, and left in 2000. His letter of August 18, 2010, told Duquesne’s clients he was retiring from managing their money. In January 2026 he was still running his own capital.
He argues that liquidity moves markets, and that an investor judges a company by where its situation will stand a year and a half out, not by what it earns now. Both came from Drelles in 1978. He reads the economy from the bottom up, starting with what companies report about their businesses. In November 2024, on the podcast of Norges Bank Investment Management, he gave the rule: “I have found it’s very important never to invest in the present. Always try and envision the situation as you see it in 18 to 24 months.”
Liquidity first is a game he set his staff at the end of 2003, with fed funds at 1 percent. He asked where the rate would be if they had just come down from Mars and seen only the data. The lowest guess was 3 percent. The big bet is the pound in September 1992, which by his 2022 account cost 50 basis points if Britain did not devalue and paid 2,000 if it did, 40 to 1. The nerve to reverse is January 2000, when he sold every technology stock he held while the market was still rising. He said in November 2016 that he had never used a stop loss in 40 years, but that he exits when the reason he bought starts to change.
The program opens in the summer of 1992, with a call from London about houses and a trade that cost half a percent to put on. It goes back to Pittsburgh, where a mentor promoted him in 1978 because he was young enough to charge, and to the oil and defense list of 1979. It follows Duquesne’s first bet in 1981 and the rocky start at Soros before the Berlin Wall fell. It gives what Soros taught him about size, in baseball terms. It has the technology trade of 1999 and 2000 and the summer he spent away from every price. It ends with the letter of August 18, 2010, and the advice he gives himself in a drawdown.
The program quotes him from his own talks and interviews, and from one letter. He told the story of the pound in November 2024 and gave the short version at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference in September 2022. He spoke about Pittsburgh to his neighbors at the Lost Tree Club in North Palm Beach, Florida, in January 2015. He explained the Federal Reserve’s bond buying to the Economic Club of New York in May 2020. His USC Marshall keynote of May 2023 and Bloomberg’s investment conference of June 2023 are in it. Morgan Stanley recorded the latest conversation, Hard Lessons, in Grand Central Terminal on January 30, 2026.
The complete program runs sixty minutes.
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Transcript
The transcript is available for download to members only.
