Behind every billionaire there is a story!

Richard Perry, hedge fund superstar, hasn’t had a down year in his flagship fund in 14 years.

If you’ve never heard of Perry, that’s no accident. He’s deeply secretive. At 53 he is one of the most successful investors of our time, but until now he has never been profiled in a major magazine. Yet Perry’s consistently superb performance puts him in the league of well-known hedge gods like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller. In the 20 years since he started Perry Capital, fresh out of Goldman Sachs, his flagship fund - now with $14 billion in assets - has never had a down year. He’s been up an average over that time of 15.4% annually after fees.

Perry was one of a few on Wall Street, for instance, to start betting against subprime mortgages in late 2006. “We could see there was a lot of bad behavior by financial institutions,” he says. Perry Capital shorted $3 billion in subprime securities, a bet that yielded $1 billion last year. His fund was up 11.7% after fees, according to investors, more than double the S&P 500’s 5.5% gain. (He charges a 1.5% management fee, less than the 2% charged by most hedge funds, and the typical 20% of profits.)

read the rest published by Fortune here:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/07/magazines/fortune/vickers_perry.fortune/index.htm?section=money_latest