Peter Borish is one of the least-discussed figures in a story that most traders know well. Paul Tudor Jones is credited with one of the great macro trades in market history — shorting Black Monday on October 19, 1987, as the Dow dropped more than 22% in a single session. What is seldom acknowledged is that the analytical framework behind that trade was built by Borish. As Director of Research and founding partner at Tudor Investment Corporation, he constructed the model that mapped the 1987 market against the run-up preceding the 1929 crash and identified the structural parallels that Jones acted on.
Borish has described his own role without overstatement: “I don’t want to inflate my expertise, at the time I met Paul I was just a young kid not long out of grad school. He needed someone to build this model, which I was able to do and was fortunate enough to get the job at Tudor. We made it through the 1987 crash, which really put us on the map.”
That model was what Borish later called an “analog overlay” — a chart that placed the 1980s market trajectory on top of the 1920s and showed a correlation described at the time as “astonishingly robust.” Jones used it alongside his technical analysis of the Dow’s deviation from long-term trend. The combination gave Tudor conviction to position for a crash before it happened.
From the Federal Reserve to Tudor Investment
Borish’s career began at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he monitored foreign exchange futures and options. That work gave him a foundation in how institutional markets function and where structural risks accumulate. From the Fed he moved to Tudor Investment Corporation as a founding partner, a role he held for ten years.
His academic background reinforced the analytical side: a BA in Economics and a Masters of Public Policy, both from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. The policy training matters. Borish has always operated at the intersection of markets and the broader forces — regulatory, macroeconomic, institutional — that move them.
His work extended beyond trading. He served as a staff member of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms, known as the Brady Commission, which was convened to study the causes of the October 1987 market decline. Having helped anticipate the crash through his research at Tudor, Borish then contributed to the official government inquiry into what happened and why. Few traders have been on both sides of a market event at that level.
Ten Years at Tudor
For a decade, Borish was the second-ranking person at one of the most successful macro hedge funds in history. Tudor Investment Corporation during that period was building the reputation it still holds — a firm that combined rigorous quantitative research with macro conviction and tight risk management. Borish was central to the research architecture. He developed trade and risk management models and served as the analytical counterweight to Jones’s intuitive macro positioning.
When Borish left Tudor in 1995, he was candid about his reasons: “I needed a better work-life balance, and starting my own firm — rather than being number two — allowed me to spend more time with my children.” Tudor by that point had grown into an institution. Borish wanted to operate at a scale where he controlled the decision-making and the culture.
Computer Trading Corporation
After Tudor, Borish founded Computer Trading Corporation (CTC) in 1995, a CTA focused on macroeconomic investing in the derivatives markets. He created the trade and risk management models CTC uses in-house. The firm reflects his core view: that systematic models are necessary for discipline, but that the builder of a model has advantages over someone who purchases one and trades it blind. As Borish put it in a debate with floor trader Tom Baldwin:
When things are going well, nothing beats a system because a discretionary trader will beat himself because he’ll think it can’t go this far, it can’t go any further. A system forces you to make the hard trade and keeps you in the trade. What happens of course when it ends, and it’s not a hard trade anymore, but the wrong trade. That’s when the discretionary trader comes in. That’s what makes a market. Sometimes a discretionary trader has an advantage, sometimes a local, and sometimes the systems trader has the advantage. And then there are those days when we all get killed.
That passage contains more practical honesty about systematic trading than most books on the subject. Systems win when they force trades that discretionary judgment would avoid. The problem is symmetric: systems also force trades when discretionary judgment would correctly exit. Borish holds no illusions about this.
On Systems Development and Real-World Constraints
Borish is careful about the gap between backtested systems and live trading. In the same debate, he addressed the problem that plagues every systematic trader who has looked at clean historical data and then traded a live market:
The real world is not a computer. Your system may assume that if I had a stop at a certain price that I could have gotten filled tomorrow on the unemployment date. You have to build into your system development those type of real world contingencies that take place because when you look back historically, you’ll see a long large bar on that day and it will have a high and a low. Any system software out there will make the assumption you could have gotten filled there in the course of the day in that range. The technology is not there whereby you can replicate and build a perfect system.
Slippage, liquidity gaps, news events — a backtested system will show a fill at a price that never traded in size. This is not a minor quibble. It is the difference between a system that looks profitable on paper and one that holds up in production. Borish built models at Tudor during one of the most volatile decades in market history, which means he tested these ideas in conditions that punished unrealistic assumptions.
Beyond Trading: Policy, Philanthropy, and Infrastructure
Borish’s career has run in parallel tracks. Alongside his trading work he has held substantive roles in market structure and policy. He served as a Board Member of the Futures Industry Association, a Special Advisor to the Board of Directors of the Chicago Board of Trade, and as a Board Member of OneChicago, LLC, the single-stock futures exchange. He invested in and sat on the board of Quadriserv, a technology-driven securities lending platform.
He has also served as Chairman of the Institute for Financial Markets, a nonprofit working on standards and best practices in financial services — the kind of structural work that rarely makes headlines but shapes the rules everyone trades under.
On the philanthropic side, Borish was a founding member of the Robin Hood Foundation alongside Paul Tudor Jones and Glenn Dubin. The foundation funds educational projects for children in New York City. He has also served as a mayoral appointee to the Youth Board of the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development and as a Board Member of the Math for America Foundation.
Borish’s Advice for Traders Starting Out
On the question of how newer traders build a track record in an institutional environment, Borish has been direct: “The problem for a lot of traders in investment banks is a lack of a demonstrable track record. My advice is to be as entrepreneurial as possible, start small and develop a reputation over the course of 24 to 36 months.”
That advice reflects his own path. He did not arrive at Tudor as a famous trader. He arrived as a young economist who could build models. He built the right one at the right moment, and that became the foundation for everything that followed.
More on Borish
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