Anthony Ward may have craved chocolate as a child but there was little in the early career of this mild-mannered commodities trader that marked him out as a future “Chocfinger” as he has been dubbed this week after his devilishly brilliant trades in the cocoa market.
His coup sounds extraordinarily glamorous. Prices of the basic ingredient of chocolate rose to their highest level in 33 years after his hedge fund amassed a large chunk of the world's stocks of cocoa beans. Some have seen him as the 21st-century equivalent of Nelson and William Hunt, the brothers who cornered the silver market in 1979-1980 by taking control of most of the world's inventories of the metal. Since then, many have seen raw materials' markets, from crude oil to cocoa, as a playground for greedy traders and an easy platform for artificially inflating prices at the expense of the consumer. By linking the 50-year-old Mr Ward to the James Bond super-villain, Goldfinger some have insinuated that he is the ultimate ruthless speculator.
But the reality is more prosaic – as so often with exotic commodities sagas. His chocolate triumph is not the result of a snap buccaneering move, but follows decades of immersing himself in the cocoa business.
Born into a military family at the heart of the British establishment, he attended Marlborough College, one of the UK's elite private boarding schools. On leaving school he went straight to work in London as a trainee at Sime Darby, the Malaysian-owned plantation company in 1979 where his first job was sampling tea. But a year later, when he joined London-based brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, he turned by chance to cocoa. He has retained his fascination with chocolate's primary ingredient and Africa, the heart of cocoa production, ever since.
At E.F. Hutton he was an apprentice who had to battle for clients against competition from more than 100 other cocoa traders and brokers in Europe and the US. Those were the long gone days of old-fashioned commodities trading: the era of telex rooms and exotic travel to civil-war torn African countries. It was a world of doing business over dinners in which Mr Ward, with his appreciation of good food and fine wine, was at ease. He rapidly progressed, ending up at Phibro, the legendary commodities arm of Salomon Smith Barney, where he rose to head cocoa and coffee trading.
Three decades after his induction into the world of cocoa, his competitors and acquaintances describe him as the most influential trader in the market. Even rivals say that rather than being a speculator he is in fact the ultimate analyst, one who believes in thorough research. His perfectionism led Armajaro, the trading house and hedge fund manager he co-founded in 1998, to deploy staff every year to Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer, to count cocoa pods to gain an edge over rivals in forecasting the size of the crop. To the same end, he set up a network of weather stations.
Notwithstanding his attention to detail, his chocolate career has had ups and downs. In 1996, he amassed a huge position in cocoa in London, taking delivery of 300,000 tonnes of beans – at that time equal to 10 per cent of the crop – betting that Ivory Coast's crop would under-perform. The harvest surged, and he suffered large losses as prices declined.
But by 2002, it was clear Ivory Coast was in deep trouble, as Mr Ward had predicted. After half a century of almost uninterrupted expansion, the Ivorian cocoa machine, which accounts for nearly 40 per cent of global supplies, was faltering. Trees were getting old and sick and the country was immersed in a civil war. Mr Ward decided to bet big and took delivery of 148,000 tonnes of cocoa, profiting as prices surged. Cocoa, which in January 2002, traded at £1,000 a tonne peaked at £1,600 a tonne by October. The surge, he told the Financial Times then, was not a bubble – nor, he insisted, was he a speculator.
