Steve Cohen steps away from the trading platform

While the billionaire hedge fund founder remains co-chief investment officer of Point72 Asset Management with Harry Schwefel, he no longer invests clients’ capital. Cohen, 68, is instead focused on driving the company’s growth and mentoring and developing talent, the firm said in an emailed statement.

Cohen has been one of the dominant forces in the industry for more than three decades and rebuilt his hedge fund into one of the world’s largest after a costly insider trading scandal. Even as he grew his firm to one with more than 185 trading teams and branched out into other interests, including the 2020 purchase of the New York Mets, he kept a small book that he traded regularly.

“It is a tremendous value to have Steve as an impact mentor for our investment professionals,” Point72 spokeswoman Tiffany Galvin-Cohen said in the statement. “He’s been doing this for 40 years and he’s seen a lot. That’s what gives him the most satisfaction these days – helping people succeed and seeing it make a difference – and where he feels he can add the most value.”

With its teams running a diverse array of long/short, macro and quant equity investment strategies, no trader, including Cohen, is important to Point72’s ability to generate profits. However, its removal from trading is a litmus test for whether multi-strategy firms can thrive beyond their legendary founders.

Cohen has previously taken breaks from trading and his latest decision could change.

His firm has raised more than $20 billion since 2018 and managed a record $35.2 billion as of July 1, showing that investors are still eager to back a hedge fund that is run by teams of traders. Point72 has gained about 10% this year through August, and is looking to return profits to clients in 2025, Bloomberg previously reported.

“The company is much bigger than me today, which is actually very liberating,” Cohen said in a May 2021 interview with Jawad Mian, the book’s author. Stray reflections.

His previous claim to fame was a 30% annual return at a firm, then called SAC Capital Advisors, which paid a record $1.8 billion fine to settle a seven-year federal insider trading investigation . SAC pleaded guilty in 2013 to raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits and enabling a culture of crime that rewarded insider trading.

Cohen, who has consistently denied wrongdoing, was never charged or sued, although he agreed not to handle outside money for two years.

After the company’s guilty plea, Cohen changed its name to Point72, returned capital to clients and traded using his own wealth. In early 2018, he returned to managing money for outside investors.

Cohen has been interested in scholarship since he was 13 years old. He began tracking the stocks listed in the New York Post that his father, a dressmaker, brought home to suburban Great Neck, New York, every night.

Cohen left Long Island for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he often skipped class to track stocks at a local brokerage. He himself taught himself to be a master “tape reader”, able to predict the direction of a stock by watching every price tick and the volume of shares traded.

After graduating in 1977 with a degree in economics, Cohen joined Gruntal, a brokerage firm in New York. Cohen came on board as a proprietary trader, buying and selling stocks with Gruntal’s money. He prospered and in 1985 became the company’s chief trader, a job he held until 1992 when he quit to start SAC.

Cohen has a net worth of $14.7 billion, placing him among the 100 richest Americans, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

(Updates with fundraising in seventh paragraph, career start from 12th.)