THE high-risk, high-octane and hard-living reputation of hedge-fund managers means the lucrative sector is often considered the last bastion of male dominance in global markets.

But tucked away in Canary Wharf, far from the Mayfair stamping ground of most of London’s star managers, Elena Ambrosiadou, founder of Ikos Partners, has built one of the most successful hedge funds in the world — and become Britain’s best-paid businesswoman.

According to documents recently filed at Companies House, Ambrosiadou, 46, the only director of Ikos, was paid a total of £15.9m last year. This is nearly double her 2003 pay of £7.9m.

The package is more than four times bigger than that of the next-highest-paid woman, Ann Gloag of Stagecoach, who earned £3.9m last year. The only female who earns more in Britain is JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter children’s books, who made £80m last year. The hedge-fund manager is likely to appear in next year’s Sunday Times City Rich List.

Ambrosiadou started Ikos, which means “home” in Greek, in 1992 as a trading account. It was one of the first hedge funds set up in London. Since then, the flagship Financial Fund has generated a total return of 144.4% and an annualised return of 10.2%.

During the first five months of this year — a period when even the best hedge funds reported one of the toughest times on record — Ikos generated returns of 25.8% in one of its flagship funds.

Ikos now has more than $2 billion of assets under management and employs 35 people.

Thessaloniki-born Ambrosiadou previously worked with BP in London, Sydney and America and was its youngest-ever senior executive at the age of 27.

She told The Sunday Times: “This success has not just been in the past year. I have worked hard all my life and the success has been based on this.”

In 1992, Ambrosiadou put $100,000 of her own money in an account that would trade foreign exchange based on a computer program she had designed. When the fund went up 50% in two years, she decided to call it Ikos and work on it full-time.

Ambrosiadou’s husband, Martin Coward, who has a first-class degree in maths from Cambridge and previously worked at Goldman Sachs, is Ikos’s head of trading and strategy. The couple have one son.

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