STEVE COHEN

Steve Cohen grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, the fifth of eight kids in a middle-class Jewish family. His father was a dress manufacturer.

Cohen played poker seriously in high school — seriously enough that he later credited it with teaching him probability, reading people, and managing risk under pressure. These skills turned out to be worth about $21 billion.

He studied economics at Penn's Wharton School, graduated in 1978, and landed a job as a junior options trader at Gruntal & Co., a now-defunct New York brokerage. On his first day, he made $8,000 for the firm.

By the end of the year, he was generating $100,000 a day. He was 22.

Within a few years, he was running his own trading desk at Gruntal, taking on more risk, making more money, and developing the instincts that would define his career.

In 1992, Cohen left to start SAC Capital Advisors with $25 million — $10 million of his own money and $15 million from outside investors. The name came from his initials.

From the beginning, SAC was different. Cohen traded with ferocious intensity, churning through positions at a speed that most institutional investors considered reckless.

He wasn't building portfolios. He was hunting for edges, transaction by transaction, hour by hour.

SAC's returns over the next two decades were extraordinary. The fund averaged roughly 30% annually, net of fees — and the fees were brutal, typically 3% management and 50% performance.

Even after that, investors kept coming back because the net returns were still better than almost anything else available. At its peak, SAC managed $16 billion and was responsible for up to 3% of daily US stock trading volume.

Cohen personally made over $1 billion a year during the fund's best years.

Then came the legal trouble. Federal prosecutors had been investigating SAC for years, following a broader crackdown on hedge fund insider trading.

Between 2010 and 2013, eight former SAC employees were convicted of insider trading. The firm itself pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2013 and paid $1.8 billion in penalties — at the time, the largest insider trading settlement in history.

Cohen was never personally charged, but the SEC barred him from managing outside money until 2018.

He converted SAC into a family office, renamed it Point72 Asset Management, and continued investing his own fortune. When the two-year bar expired, he opened Point72 back up to outside investors.

The firm now manages around $35 billion. Cohen also bought the New York Mets in 2020 for $2.4 billion, the highest price ever paid for an MLB franchise at that time.

He has since invested heavily in the team, signing major free agents and turning the Mets into one of the highest-payroll teams in baseball.

He also became famous — or infamous — for his role in the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021. Point72 had backed Melvin Capital, which was one of the funds heavily short GameStop.

When Reddit's WallStreetBets community drove the stock from $20 to nearly $500, Melvin needed emergency capital. Point72 and Citadel injected $2.75 billion into Melvin.

Cohen was vilified on social media. He got death threats.

He briefly deleted his Twitter account. Melvin eventually closed in 2022 after further losses.

Cohen kept going.

SAC Capital Advisors was the vehicle that made Cohen a legend. Founded in 1992 with $25 million, it became one of the most profitable hedge funds in history — returning an average of 30% annually for two decades before its criminal settlement and conversion to a family office.

The strategy was intense short-term trading across equities, combined with a vast network of analysts and, the government argued, sometimes information they shouldn't have had.

Point72 Asset Management is the reincarnation of SAC, operating today as a multi-strategy hedge fund managing roughly $35 billion. It runs global long/short equity, macro strategies, and systematic trading under one roof.

After the two-year bar on managing outside capital lifted in 2018, Cohen reopened Point72 to institutional investors. The firm employs over 2,000 people and operates out of offices in Stamford, Connecticut.

The New York Mets are Cohen's most public investment. He bought the MLB franchise in November 2020 for $2.4 billion, making it the most expensive sports franchise sale in history at the time.

He has spent aggressively — the Mets had one of the highest payrolls in baseball by 2023, exceeding $300 million — and has been vocal about wanting to win a World Series. Cohen is also a significant collector of contemporary art, with a collection estimated at over $1 billion.

His art has included works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Pablo Picasso.

Cohen is a trader first and foremost, which puts him in a different category from most famous investors. Warren Buffett buys a business and holds it for decades.

Cohen buys a stock and might sell it in minutes, hours, or days. His edge was never about finding the best long-term business — it was about reading what the market was about to do next, better and faster than anyone else.

He runs a high-conviction, high-turnover operation. SAC was famous for taking large positions quickly, moving markets just by trading, and exiting just as fast.

Cohen reportedly monitors up to six screens at once and takes positions personally in between managing his army of analysts and portfolio managers. He is involved in the trades, not just the oversight.

The model at both SAC and Point72 is 'pod shops' — independent portfolio managers running their own books within the fund, each with their own P&L targets and drawdown limits. If a PM bleeds too much capital, they get cut.

It's ruthless and effective. Cohen essentially built a factory for generating trading ideas, staffed it with some of the most aggressive traders on Wall Street, and skimmed the best of what they produced.

Think of it like a trading firm where the floor manager also plays poker at the highest table.

His edge historically came from information — being faster, better-connected, and more plugged-in than competitors. He built a culture where analysts were expected to bring specific, actionable intelligence: not just 'I think the stock will go up' but 'the company's supply chain contact told me inventory is tightening.' The line between aggressive research and insider trading turned out to be one that some of his employees crossed.

Cohen himself claimed he never knowingly received material non-public information. Prosecutors couldn't prove otherwise.

Post-SAC, Point72 has diversified its strategies significantly — adding systematic/quant trading, macro, and discretionary long/short. Cohen still plays, but the fund is less dependent on any single approach or any single person's genius.

The biggest win is SAC Capital itself — the entire 20-year run. Cohen started with $25 million in 1992 and grew it into a fund managing $16 billion.

Over that period, he averaged approximately 30% annual returns before fees. After fees, his investors still made extraordinary returns, and Cohen personally took home over $1 billion a year during the fund's peak years.

His personal cut from the 50% performance fee structure alone made him one of the wealthiest people in America.

A more specific example: during the 2008 financial crisis, when most hedge funds were being destroyed, SAC managed its exposure carefully and significantly outperformed the market. Cohen had been warning his team about mortgage risk months before Lehman Brothers collapsed.

His macro awareness combined with his trading discipline let him sidestep much of the carnage that wiped out competitors.

And then the Mets, in a different sense. He bought the franchise for $2.4 billion in 2020.

By 2023, Forbes estimated the Mets were worth $2.9 billion. He's already sitting on a half-billion in appreciation — and he still owns the team.

The $1.8 billion insider trading settlement in 2013 is the obvious answer, but Cohen would probably frame it differently. He never admitted personal wrongdoing.

The mistake, from his perspective, was building a culture so focused on gaining edge through information that some of his employees crossed lines he claims he didn't know they were crossing. Eight of his people were convicted.

The firm pleaded guilty. He paid $1.8 billion in penalties — real money, even for him — and was barred from managing outside capital for two years.

The actual cost was larger than the fine. SAC's reputation was destroyed.

The fund had to return all outside capital. Cohen lost the platform he'd spent 20 years building.

And the two-year bar meant watching markets move while sitting on the sidelines. He turned it into Point72 and rebuilt, which took real psychological resilience, but the original SAC Capital is gone.

Another notable stumble: his support for Melvin Capital during the GameStop crisis in January 2021. Point72 and Citadel injected $2.75 billion into Melvin to keep it from imploding.

Melvin still eventually collapsed in 2022 after continued losses. Cohen's goodwill investment — and the public relations nightmare of being associated with the short position that Reddit traders were targeting — was a bruising episode.

He received death threats, briefly quit Twitter, and became one of the most hated figures in retail investor culture for a period.

Cohen's financial philosophy is rooted in one core belief: information and conviction are the only things that matter. He's not interested in diversification as a risk-reduction strategy.

He'd rather take a large, well-researched position in one idea than spread money across twenty mediocre ones. 'I'd rather be 80% right and fully invested than 100% hedged and making nothing' is the Cohen mentality.

He believes that most investors are too cautious and too passive. He told his analysts that being wrong and doing nothing is the same failure as being wrong and losing money.

Sitting on cash when there's an edge to be had is just as much a mistake as betting on a bad idea. Decisiveness is a core value.

He's also deeply focused on process. Cohen has talked publicly about the importance of separating 'I was wrong about this trade' from 'I am a bad trader.' Emotional detachment from individual outcomes is how you survive a career in short-term trading.

He has been interested in sports psychology and performance coaching for years — Point72 reportedly has invested in programs to help traders manage the psychological demands of the job.

On the legal side of things, Cohen's philosophy seems to be: play aggressive, stay within what you can personally defend, and build systems robust enough that the people beneath you can't take you down. Whether that philosophy fully held up between 2008 and 2013 is something only Cohen knows for certain.

Cohen grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, one of eight children. His father worked in the garment industry.

Cohen has been married twice. His first marriage, to Patricia Finke, ended in a contentious divorce in 1990.

Patricia Cohen later sued him for fraud, alleging he had hidden assets during their divorce settlement. The case dragged through courts for years and was ultimately dismissed.

He married Alexandra Garcia, known as Alex, in 1992, the same year he founded SAC. They have seven children between them — two from his first marriage and five together.

Alex Cohen has become a significant public figure in her own right through her philanthropy, particularly around mental health and veterans' causes.

Cohen is famously passionate about the New York Mets — he's been a fan since childhood growing up on Long Island. Buying the team in 2020 was described by people close to him as a lifelong dream.

He is notoriously active on social media around Mets news and sometimes engages directly with fans, which is unusual for a billionaire of his stature. His handle was @StevenACohen72.

He briefly deleted his account during the GameStop chaos when the threats got serious enough that it was no longer fun.

Cohen attended Great Neck North High School on Long Island, where he got serious about poker — running games that he later credited with teaching him to read probability and manage risk. He went on to study economics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, graduating in 1978.

Wharton gave him the theoretical framework, but poker gave him the instincts. He has said that his poker background was more formative for his trading career than anything he learned in a classroom.

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