Steve Cohen’s Next Innings

A kick-off event: I’m in New York this week and hope to see many of you on Wednesday and Thursday at our Future of Asset Management North America event at etc.venues 360 Madison. We have a great range of speakers including Salim Ramjithe new CEO of Vanguard, Neuberger Bermanhis George Walkerand Franklin Templetonhis Jenny Johnson. Register here and use code AMNL10 for 10% off.

And a teaspoon: Sandra Robertsonwho has led Oxford University’s £6.5bn endowment fund since it was set up almost two decades ago, is stepping down as chief investment officer of Oxford University Endowment Management and will be replaced by the Deputy CIO The Mohsin clan.

In today’s newsletter:

• Steve Cohen retires from trading at hedge fund Point72

• BlackRock and Microsoft are planning a $30 billion fund to invest in infrastructure

• Nuclear fuel prices are rising as the west laments the lack of conversion facilities

How Steven Cohen ran a hedge fund like a baseball team

Steve Cohen used to charter a yacht in the Mediterranean with a friend and art dealer Larry Gagosian. But it never really stopped.

“We’d be in the middle of a wonderful dinner in Italy and he’d have to run back to the boat to make the exchange,” Gagosian said, recalling how the hedge fund billionaire would have screens set up below decks to create a de facto transaction. floor.

“I said, Steve, I love you and I like going on trips with you, but it’s not the most relaxing.”

However, after an investment career spanning almost half a century, Cohen, 68, announced last week that he was retiring from trading at Point 72the hedge fund he created a decade ago to focus on running the company.

Point72 rose from the ashes of an insider trading scandal at its predecessor SAC Capital which cost $1.8 billion to settle — the largest ever for insider trading — and Cohen was subsequently banned for two years from handling outside investors’ money.

In this profile, Costas Mourselas and I explore one of the hedge fund industry’s best comeback stories, from the discount and momentum atmosphere at SAC, where the returns seemed to be real (they were) to today’s Point72, a business that employs 2,800 people and runs over $35. billion assets.

“Steve treated the business like a baseball team — if your shortstop doesn’t perform, then you trade him,” says one person who worked with him at SAC. “There are no personal relationships, it’s just business.”

Cohen is equally known for his ownership of New York Mets and its world-renowned art collection, as it is for its commercial acumen. The collection is worth more than $1 billion and includes works by him Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Alberto Giacometti. What sets Cohen apart as a collector, Gagoisan says, is that “he’s as interested in seeing a new artist as he is in going after a trophy. That’s not always the case.”

For Gagosian, his friend’s transition from player to coach may mean their vacations can resume. “We stopped chartering boats all together,” he said. “Maybe now we’ll do it again.”

Read our full story here. And don’t miss this 2006 New York article about the “40 million dollar elbow”, one of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard. Casino tycoon Steve Wynn had agreed to sell Le Rêve”, Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walterto Cohen and had reached an agreement. But while Wynn was showing the painting to friends the night before the exchange, he accidentally elbowed his way through it. . .

BlackRock and Microsoft are planning a $30 billion fund to invest in AI infrastructure

Energy is becoming one of the biggest barriers for companies looking to exploit recent advances in artificial intelligence, he writes Brooke Masters in New York. The biggest digital companies are already warning of severe capacity bottlenecks in the coming years, as AI computing power requires far more energy than previous technological innovations.

BlackRock announced last week that it was joining forces with Microsoft and MGXthe Abu Dhabi-backed investment company to solve this problem with one of the largest investment vehicles ever raised on Wall Street. The three groups will serve as general partners in the Global AI Investment Partnership, which will invest in data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to support them.

The partnership seeks to raise up to $30 billion in equity investment and leverage to support up to an additional $70 billion in debt financing. Nvidiathe fast-growing chip maker, will advise on AI fab design and integration.

The fund will be administered by Global Infrastructure Partners and marks its first major fund since the private infrastructure investment group agreed to be acquired by BlackRock for $12.5 billion earlier this year. That deal is set to close next month.

“The country and the world will need more capital investment to accelerate the development of the necessary AI infrastructure,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’his president, he told Brooke. “This kind of effort is an important step.”

The fund marks the latest vehicle created by a major asset manager to address the growing demand for energy to power generative AI and cloud computing. Earlier this year, Microsoft agreed to back $10 billion in Canadian-built renewable energy projects Brookfield Asset Management.

“Mobilizing private capital to build AI infrastructure like data centers and power will unlock a multi-trillion dollar long-term investment opportunity,” says Larry Fink, BlackRock executive director.

Nuclear fuel prices are rising

The price of nuclear reactor fuel has risen much faster than that of crude uranium since early 2022, in a sign of gridlock in the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Harry Dempsey in London.

Enriched uranium has tripled in price to $176 per separative work unit — the standard measure of effort required to separate uranium isotopes — since early 2022, according to UxCa data provider.

Uranium demand has been driven by a resurgence in nuclear power in recent years. However, Russia is playing a significant role in the multi-stage process of turning mined uranium into fuel for a nuclear reactor. This includes turning yellowcake – uranium concentrate – into uranium hexafluoride gas, enriching it to increase the concentration of the type of uranium used for fission, and then turning the enriched uranium into pellets that go into reactors.

The price of uranium hexafluoride has quadrupled to $68 a kilogram over the same period, indicating that conversion is the biggest bottleneck in the nuclear fuel supply chain, analysts said. Instead, uranium ore doubled in price.

“Conversion and enrichment prices reflect a much greater supply squeeze due to the Russia-Ukraine war and other factors,” it said Jonathan Hinzethe executive director of UxC.

“Uranium alone does not tell the whole story when it comes to price impacts in the nuclear fuel supply chain.”

Five must-see stories this week

Steven Eismanbest known for betting on the collapse of the US housing market, has been placed on indefinite leave by his employer Neuberger Berman after saying he was “celebrating” the destruction of Gaza.

Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson brushed aside Wall Street worries that Donald TrumpHis plans to raise tariffs will hurt the economy, calling for the US to “decouple” from China.

Vanguard gave investors in a handful of its funds the chance to vote their shares last year as part of a groundbreaking push to give people a say in the governance of America’s biggest companies. In the end, nearly half of investors opted to let Vanguard do it for them.

Private equity is doing poorly – however you measure it, it says Lex. Undeterred, private equity firms are aggressively pushing to include language in loan documents to increase transaction payouts.

UK state-supported pension scheme Nest agreed a bond with the insurer Legal & General and the Dutch pension fund administrator PGGM to invest up to £1 billion in build-to-let properties.

And finally

The latest FT magazine is a must-read guide to business lunches. It features our favorite London business lunch restaurants, why lunchtime gossip is set for a comeback and a review of Sweetings, the city’s ultimate canteen. Plus I got an interview Jesus Adornomaître d’ at the legendary Le Caprice, about his memories of nearly four decades of ego management, extreme discretion and Diana, Princess of Wales.