From a council flat to online share trading billionaire
His alcoholic father would drink up to 25 pints and a bottle of rum a day and his mother died in tragic circumstances, but the Rolls Royce-driving Lord Peter Cruddas hasn’t let his painful past define him.
Peter Andrew Cruddas, the founder of global online share trading firm CMC Markets, has never let his painful past define him.
The now Rolls Royce-driving Brexiteer and former British Conservative party treasurer, who controversially became a Member of the House of Lords in 2021 as Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch, grew up on a council estate in East London.
His alcoholic father John would drink up to 25 pints of Guinness and a bottle of rum each day.
“My dad was pretty useless, actually. He was always off his head. He drank and smoked himself to death. In his defence he was in the army in the Second World War, so I now think that affected him a bit,” he says bluntly.
“But I mean, you don’t think about that when you are growing up and you’ve got a useless father. So I’ve tried to be a good father to all my children.”
For the first 18 months of his career after quitting school at the age of 15, a teenage Cruddas would give the wages from his 14-hour night shifts as a telex operator at Western Union to his mother, Lillian, who worked in the City of London as an office cleaner.
She meant everything to him and his two brothers.
“It made me realise the power of money and hard work. You can get it easily by winning the lottery. But generally, if you want to succeed, you’ve got to work,” he says.
“So I kept working at it, and I kept helping my mum and that made me feel really good thinking she would have to work less because of what I gave her. So that drove me forward really to change her life, which I did. I bought her a bungalow, a car and I used to pay for her to go on holiday.”
She died in 2001 after a battle with lung cancer.
“It was about helping my family. Now in more recent times I’ve paid for my children’s education, I now pay for my grandchildren’s school fees, and so on. They key is to just keep helping them, pushing them forward.”
That ethos now runs through his family philanthropy – he has established the Peter Cruddas Foundation to help disadvantaged young people – and the online share trading firm he started in 1989 known as Currency Management Consultants.
Now known as CMC Markets, it has grown to have multiple offices worldwide and more than 80,000 active clients.
Sydney celebrations
Last year the company celebrated the 20th anniversary of opening an office in Sydney and today CMC Invest is the largest bank-agnostic retail stockbroker in Australia.
The CMC Invest platform offers over 40,000 instruments across 15 international exchanges and following its success in Australia, it launched in Singapore earlier this year, its debut in Asia. Next it will launch in the UK and the broader Asian region.
CMC Markets Australia now employs 500 staff and represents 40 per cent of CMC’s global income. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.
In May last year the Australian arm was hit with a class action over its marketing of highly leveraged contracts for difference (CFDs) and binary options to retail investors, which were allegedly complex, highly risky and unsuitable for that segment of the market.
Cruddas says volumes in Australia increased 142 per cent during the first quarter of 2023 and CMC is now building a massive options platform allowing clients to trade multiple different assets.
Its most valuable business here is traders over 40 years of age.
“These people want to get rich quickly, their concentration span doesn’t seem to last for too long,” Cruddas quips.
While the internet has driven down the cost and broadened out trading financial markets to a wider audience, he believes that despite the rise of algorithmic trading and artificial intelligence, the human element will always have pride of place.
“The thing is that people like to trade themselves, they like to feel that they’ve been successful, they like to be in control of their own investments. Whether you are allocating money to a fund, an algorithm or a bot, it doesn’t replace that feeling of being in control of your own financial future and your family’s financial future. That’s a key element that I think will never go away,” he declares.
“The world is moving with tax breaks and opportunities to encourage people to manage their own wealth and futures. Sure, there’s some great bots out there, I’m sure they do very well. But at the end of the day, I don’t think they will replace people wanting to trade for themselves, because it is exciting.”
Royal connections
Cruddas, who turns 70 this year, still owns a majority stake in CMC Markets worth around £700m ($1.34bn).
Twenty-three years ago he turned down an offer of £50m for the company.
He owns watches worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, a Rolls Royce – and has an electric one on order – lives in an eight-bedroom mansion in Mayfair and charters private jets to fly around the world (he flies first class commercial when he comes to Australia).
Yet ask if wealth has changed him and the answer is surprisingly equivocal.
“I don’t know. I’ve been happily married for 36 years, I’ve got good family, my children are successful. But I don’t know,” he muses. He has four children, two from each of his marriages.
“It has allowed me to be more generous. But I haven’t allowed money to control me. I enjoy my life. I love my company. I love being in the CMC office every day. You know, I spent all day yesterday with my wife and daughter and her husband. We got coffee and croissants in the high street. My wife and I then spent time with my granddaughter kicking a ball with her and stuff. So I don’t know if it has changed me really.”
The Peter Cruddas Foundation was established in December 2006 and is now one of the biggest private donors to the Prince’s Trust, a UK charity founded in 1976 by King Charles (then Prince of Wales) that helps young people aged 11 to 30 get into jobs, education and training. Cruddas was formerly on the board.
The foundation has also long supported the Duke of Edinburgh Award, the Boy Scouts and over the past 15 years has given around £20m to more than 250 charities.
“The one thing that helped me more than anything when I was young was being in the Boy Scouts because I was brought up in a dysfunctional household with no money. The scouts really helped me so when I started to get money, I wanted to give it to youth organisations like them.”
Yet he does worry about the impact of money on his own children.
“I’ve brought them up into a very high standard of living and I want them to be comfortable. But all of my children have succeeded at school. They’ve worked hard. So they’ve not taken it for granted,” he says.
His youngest daughter is now 33 and a vascular surgeon working for the UK National Health Service. She was moved up a year at school so graduated a year early, then studied history before turning to medicine.
“I will never forget the day she said to me two things. One was ‘Dad, one thing your success has given me is being always able to work for the NHS. I will never do private medicine. I don’t need the money because of you. You’ve bought me a lovely apartment, you’ve taken care of me, you’ve paid for all of my education. In return, I’m just going to work for the NHS, and I’m not going to go private’,” Cruddas recalls her saying.
“The other thing she said to me was ‘You know what? I’ve got a good salary, I’ve got a roof over my head, so spend all your money. Don’t leave me anything. I’ve got a good life. I don’t need any more.’ That made me feel great.”
Sporting obsession
One of the worst financial decisions of his life was not buying 10 per cent of his beloved Arsenal Football Club for £40m when he had the chance in 2006. The club is now worth over £2bn.
The most extreme thing he’s ever purchased for fun was a round of golf for £50,000 at one of the world’s most famous golf courses in the US with one of Britain’s greatest all-time golfers, who he declines to name.
He plays golf regularly and last month did a two-week trip around some of the best courses in America.
“Golf is my time off, my time for myself and I meet my buddies. It’s just my way of unwinding and relaxing. I play every Saturday morning and in the summer I play twice a week.”
Given his humble upbringing, becoming a Member of the House of Lords in 2021 was something special.
“I was brought up on a Hackney council estate in a council flat. We had no money. We didn’t have a car. My two brothers – I’ve got a twin brother and an older brother – were black taxi drivers. One of them is retired now. So for a humble person like me to end up in the House of Lords, I’m absolutely thrilled and honoured,” he says.
“I love it because it is a platform for me to stay interested in politics and to get involved. I’ve got one of the best voting records in the House of Lords, so I take it seriously.”
But given Cruddas was a former Tory party treasurer and a strong supporter of former prime minister Boris Johnson, his appointment led to allegations of cronyism after Johnson defied the advice from the Lords Appointments Commission in anointing his friend.
Cruddas was also a key Brexit campaigner who donated £1.5m to the Vote Leave campaign.
“If you are a conservative Brexiteer, you are the lowest of low in the Westminster political bubble, and you are going to get shit thrown at you all the time, no matter what you do,” Cruddas snaps when asked about the scandal.
What was more problematic for Cruddas was the appointment came 10 years after he had resigned as party co-treasurer in 2012 after a newspaper story suggested he was offering access to then Prime Minister David Cameron for a donation of £250,000 a year.
The following year he won £180,000 in damages in a defamation. The amount was later reduced to £50,000 on appeal.
“First and foremost, I’m a businessman, okay. My success has come through business. I didn’t need a job from the government or the Conservative Party. I had a life outside of politics,” he declares.
“I know that I did nothing wrong and I know that what was printed about me was a pack of lies. I’m not the sort of person to take shit sitting down, and I’ve stood up for myself all my life. So it wasn’t even me thinking about clearing my name. I just thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to take this crap from anybody.’ So I fought back.”
A decade on, he firmly believes his reputation – especially in business – remains untarnished. So what did he learn from the affair?
“There is not a lot you can learn other than the fact there are people out there with a different political view to yours that will constantly spin things to their way of thinking. If you are going to get involved in politics, you are going to meet people that will just twist and turn everything,” he says.
“The problem is, once you put your head above the wall in politics, the other side are going to have a pop at you. But you just stick by your principles. Quite frankly, I take it as a badge of honour.”
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