John W. Henry

John William Henry II (born September 13, 1949) is an American businessman and the founder of John W. Henry & Company, an investment management firm.

He is the principal owner of Liverpool Football Club, the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Penguins, The Boston Globe, and co-owner of RFK Racing.

As of August 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth to be US$4 billion.

Henry was born on September 13, 1949, in Quincy, Illinois.

His parents were soybean farmers, and he split his time growing up between Illinois and Arkansas.

At age 15, his asthmatic condition prompted his family to move to Apple Valley, California, where Henry attended and graduated from Victor Valley High School in Victorville, California.

Henry then attended but did not graduate from four separate colleges and universities, Victor Valley College, and then University of California, Riverside, University of California, Irvine, and UCLA, where he majored in philosophy.

He attributes not graduating to the time he spent performing and touring with two bands, Elysian Fields and Hillary.

Henry started trading corn and soybean futures to learn the basics of hedging the price risk of holding an inventory of these commodities, whether in storage or out in the field.

In 1976, a commodities broker at Reynolds Securities asked him to advise other farmers, but he declined.

After spending a summer in Norway with his first wife, Mai, Henry developed a mechanical trend following method for managing a futures trading account.

When that test proved successful, he founded John W. Henry & Company in 1981, opened a small office across the street from the airport in Irvine, California, and began marketing his management to the largest commodity brokerage firms in America.

JWH was established in 1981 and began taking retail clients in 1982.

The firm's management methods make mechanical, non-discretionary trading decisions in response to systematic determinations of reversals in each market's direction, with the explicit intention of precluding not only human emotion, but also any subjective evaluation of factors outside of price behavior, such as the fundamentals, to trigger each decision to be long or short each market, or not.

He tested his trend-reversal method—which was never out of the market but always held a position (either long or short) in every one of the markets in the account's "basket" of commodities—"using his own money," according to his marketing materials from 1983.

That proved so successful by 1983 that he moved to considerably larger quarters at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

In 1989, Henry moved to Westport, Connecticut.

Two years later, Henry established a second office in Boca Raton.

After acquiring his fortune, his first foray into professional sports was in purchasing a Minor League Baseball team, the Tucson Toros of the Pacific Coast League, in 1989.

He was also one of the founders of the Senior Professional Baseball Association, a winter league in Florida composed of retired major league players.

Henry co-owned the winning team in the 1989–90 season, the West Palm Beach Tropics, managed by Dick Williams, former manager of the Boston Red Sox's 1967 team, known as the "Impossible Dream" team.

In 1990, Henry sold his interest in the team, and the league went out of business the following year.

The same year, he negotiated to purchase the Orlando Magic, a National Basketball Association team.

He also was briefly the lead general for the Colorado Rockies, a Major League Baseball expansion team, and headed a group attempting to acquire the National Hockey League's expansion team in Florida, which was ultimately awarded to Phil and Tony Esposito, who create the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Henry subsequently negotiated to buy the Miami Heat and later the New Jersey Nets.

Henry entered Major League Baseball with his purchase of a small interest in the New York Yankees in 1991.

Henry became the sole owner of the Florida Marlins in 1999, purchasing the club from Wayne Huizenga for a reported $158 million.

In 2001, Henry partnered with Tom Werner, The New York Times Company, and other investors to found New England Sports Ventures (NESV) to bid on ownership of the Boston Red Sox.

In January 2002, Henry sold the Marlins in a multi-franchise deal to Jeffrey Loria, then owner of the Montreal Expos, which is now the Washington Nationals.

The group successfully purchased the Red Sox prior to the 2002 season from Yawkey Trust headed by John Harrington.

Henry was now principal owner of the Red Sox, with Werner as chairman.

In addition to ownership of the Red Sox, the company has continued to expand, and is now majority owner of English Football club Liverpool F.C., the Pittsburgh Penguins, the New England Sports Network, Fenway Park, Fenway Sports Management, and other assets.

He also hired baseball sabermetrics pioneer Bill James, whose work became widely known following the publication of Moneyball in 2003.

Henry accomplished his championship goal in the 2004 World Series, against his former childhood favorite Cardinals, and beat the Cardinals again in 2013.

In March 2006, Boston magazine estimated Henry's net worth at $1.1 billion, but also reported that his firm had experienced recent difficulties.

In 2009, the company made its first foray into European sports with an unsuccessful bid for the French Ligue 1 club Olympique de Marseille.

NESV formally announced its name change to Fenway Sports Group in March 2011.

Henry, as principal owner and Werner, as chairman, assembled a front office team headed up by Larry Lucchino with the express goal of "breaking the Curse of the Bambino."

On November 9, 2012, the firm announced that it would stop managing clients' money by December 31, 2012, and Henry confirmed that total assets under the firm's management had fallen from $2.5 billion in 2006 to less than $100 million as of late 2012.

Henry grew up a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, especially their star Stan Musial.