The £50m traders

Three investment bankers have just scooped one of the biggest pay days in the City's history.

Rob Standing, David Gorton and Mark Corbett have earned more than £50million between them in an astonishing first year in a new business together.

The scale of their success - exceptional even by the rarefied standards of the Square Mile - has shone a light on the shadowy world of hedge funds, where much of the truly serious money is being made far from the public gaze.

Yet they are far from stereotypical investment bankers. When they leave their offices in Mayfair they return to comfortable suburban homes in south London or the Thames Valley, rather than ostentatious "bonus belt" mansions in Chelsea or Belgravia.

The three, all in their early forties, are part of a new generation of low-key City winners who have based their success on understated intellectual firepower and steely nerve, rather than the traditional image of testosteronefuelled aggression.

Nicholas Dunbar, technical editor of Risk Magazine which analyses hedge funds, said of Mr Standing: "He is a very straightforward person, just a bright middle-class Englishman, far more technocratic than many in the City and supremely confident about dealing with very large amounts of money."

The three, who have known each other for 20 years, are the founders and directors of a firm called London Diversified Fund Management. They set it up in 2002 after walking away from their safe and incredibly wellrewarded posts at JP Morgan - one of the world's most powerful banks, for which they made hundreds of millions of pounds a year in profits.

Of the three, only Rob Standing, JP Morgan's former head of rate markets in Europe,

had any sort of public profile as a well-respected but scarcely household-name senior banking executive. The other two were simply anonymous traders, if well-regarded.

However, their firm has quickly become one of the biggest and most profitable hedge funds in London, with more than £1billion of client money under management from its offices in Mayfair. Its first set of accounts, seen by the Evening Standard, reveals how the three friends almost immediately hit one of the biggest ever City jackpots only 12 months after opening their doors to business.

The figures, which cover the year to the end of last August, show that the firm made a profit of more than £57million, of which £51.5million has gone straight into an "employee trust" for the three directors and their handful of staff.

Although how the profit will be divided is not disclosed, it is thought the three partners will share it roughly equally, with some left over to reward other staff. All three are expected to reinvest in the business.

The trio have had little to say about their success but are said by friends to be alarmed that details of their financial rewards have come into the open. The only public comment has come from Mark Corbett, who said: "We are just a humble hedge fund that had a good run. We are a very prosaic, mundane business."

Asked how the profits would be shared out, he said: "I will leave that to your imagination."