Steve Cohen steps away from trading floor

While the billionaire hedge fund founder remains Point72 Asset Management’s co-chief investment officer along with Harry Schwefel, he’s no longer investing clients’ capital. Cohen, 68, is instead focused on driving the firm’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 biggest after a costly insider-trading scandal. Even as he grew his firm into one with more than 185 trading teams and branched out into other interests, including his 2020 purchase of the New York Mets, he retained a small book that he traded regularly.

“There’s huge value in having Steve as an impactful mentor for our investment professionals,” Point72 spokesperson 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 range of strategies across equity long/short, macro and quant investment, no single trader, including Cohen, is material to Point72’s ability to generate profits. Yet his move away from trading is a litmus test to determine whether multistrategy 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 keen to back a hedge fund that’s driven by teams of traders. Point72 gained about 10% this year through August and is considering returning profits to clients in 2025, Bloomberg has reported previously.

“The firm’s a lot bigger than me today, which is actually very liberating,” Cohen said in a May 2021 interview with Jawad Mian, author of Stray Reflections. 

His previous claim to fame was a 30% annualized return atop a firm, then called SAC Capital Advisors, that paid a record $1.8 billion fine to settle a seven-year federal insider-trading probe. SAC pleaded guilty in 2013 to reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits and allowing a culture of criminality that rewarded brazen insider trading.

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

After the firm’s guilty plea, Cohen changed its name to Point72, returned client capital and traded using his own fortune. By early 2018, he was back to managing money for outside investors.

Cohen has been interested in the stock market since he was 13 years old. He started following stocks listed in the New York Post that his father, a dress manufacturer, brought home to suburban Great Neck, New York, each night.

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

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

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

(Updates with fundraising in seventh paragraph, early career starting in 12th.)