To those of us whose grasp of the workings of the world's financial markets is not all it could be, there is nonetheless an obvious and pleasing circularity to the recent travails of financier Joe Lewis, and it is perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase “what goes around, comes around”. He made a fortune on Black Wednesday - some say even more than George Soros, whose name is synonymous with the 1992 debacle in which sterling crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism - but has now lost £500 million in the collapse of Bear Stearns.

Born above a pub in Bow, East London,Lewis, 71, now lives as a tax exile in the Bahamas with his second wife, Jane, his former assistant, in a £15 million mansion that is rumoured to have trading screens in nearly every room. He made his first fortune in the family catering business, Tavistock Banqueting, which he joined as a waiter after leaving school at 15. Displaying a precocious entrepreneurial zeal, he moved a concrete bus stop to outside his father's café to increase trade, and took the business beyond the masonic functions in which it specialised to target American tourists with a kitsch “medieval banqueting” experience. In a career notable for its nurturing of protégés, including J.P.McManus, he employed the young Robert Earl, who went on to make his own fortune with the Hard Rock and Planet Hollywood chains.

He sold up in 1979 and reinvented himself as a currency trader. His hugely successful bets against the pound in 1992, followed by similar luck three years later with the Mexican peso, showed the City that here was someone to be reckoned with: they call him The Boxer, after his near-namesake, the heavyweight champion Joe Louis.

But his portfolio isn't limited to currency speculating. Investments have included a Cambridge technology firm, property in Florida and Argentina, Christie's auction house and Tottenham Hotspur football club. A keen golf and tennis player, he's also an art buff who has donated £2.5 million to the Wallace Collection. He counts Tiger Woods and Sean Connery as friends.

As he hardly ever gives interviews, it seems unlikely that he will ever shed any light on why he continues to risk so much instead of sipping cocktails on a beach. This, after all, is a man who was once described by his own daughter as disliking having to talk to people “because it aggravates him”.

“One of the rewards of your success is the quiet enjoyment of it,” he once told The New York Times. “Being on the front page of newspapers doesn't allow that.”

But even as they propel him distastefully on to the front page, his losses on Bear Stearns are unlikely to affect his standard of living. His fortune last year was estimated to be between £1.5 billion and £2.8 billion, so even at the lower estimate he still has a billion left. One imagines that's enough.