Steven Cohen Bio

Steven Cohen was born 1956 in New York, USA. Mr. Cohen graduated with a degree of economics from the Wharton Faculty in Pennsylvania, at the University of Pennsylvania. He took up the game of poker while in high school, often gambling his personal money in tourneys, which he credits for teaching him risk management. He opened an account in school with US$1,000 from his education money and his friend and subsequently put back US$7,000 into his tuition fund. Mr. Cohen started his career as a subordinate broker in the opportunities arbitrage section of Gruntal & Company in the Wall Street in 1978 after he graduated from university, and made a profit of US$8,000 for Gruntal on his very first day at work. He eventually produced an income of around one hundred thousand dollars a day for Gruntal. He was promoted to manage six traders with a US$75 million portfolio. By 1984, Mr. Cohen was operating his personal trading assembly in Gruntal & Co until 1992 when he founded his hedge fund SAC Capital Partners, a private hedge fund company, with US$20 million. At that time, when he started his personal hedge fund business, the hedge fund industry was still very small, and the “bull” market of 1990 was just warming up. With dozens of traders and portfolio managers in his employ, he managed to double the company’s assets and earn an estimate of 17.5% per annum. By 1995, he has quadrupled SAC’s assets. He began to open branches in the United States and also developed special computer software that will track undervalued or overvalued stock market.

Today, Steven Cohen is an American hedge fund managed and manages only his own family office ‎Point72 Asset Management, which was founded after closing SAC Capital Partners. He used to have a reputation as a quick-fire broker who never detained his stock positions for a long time, but has now changed his strategy to hold more and more of his equities for a longer time frame. Mr. Cohen is one of the wealthiest people in the USA.

Steven Cohen Personal Info

Steven Cohen Age – 58 Years old
Career Duration and Experience – 37 Years
Current Service – American hedge fund manager and owner of ‎Point72 Asset Management; Board of Trustees of the Robin-Hood Foundation and the Brown University

Notable Achievements:

– Founded SAC Capital Partners with $20 million of his own fund in 1992
– Just in the short span of 20 years, his firm, SAC Capital Partners now has US$14 billion assets under management
– Made a profit of US$8,000 on his first day at Gruntal, also the first day of his working life.
– The 35th richest man in the USA, with a projected take-home worth of US$8.3 billion according to a September 2011 Forbes report.
– Ranked the 94th most powerful persons by Time Magazine’s annual Time one hundred list
– Dubbed “the hedge fund king” in an article in the Wall Street Journal, circa 2006
Additional Information

Steven Cohen is a prominent art collector. He started amassing fine paintings, and has been listed on an art magazine’s “Top Ten” list of big-spending art accumulators worldwide yearly since 2002 and Forbes magazine’s “Topmost Billionaire Art Accumulators” list. He has spent an estimated US$700 million on artwork. He has also spent twenty percent of his salary at art sales over a 5-year period. Mr. Cohen owns a significant stake of Sotheby’s auction house at 4.7% to 5.9%. He is also a top patron of the Marianne Boesky art gallery. His art collection includes Edvard Munch’s “Madonna” with a 1999 purchase price of a little over US$11 million (a high price for Munch painting), a Pallock “drip” painting with a purchase price of US$52 million, a Warhol & a Picasso with a purchase price of US$25 million each, suspended shark creation, which he repaired, for an estimated minimum sum of US100,000 in 2006, Marc Quinn’s Self (a cranium sculpture completed of frozen plasma), and Willem de Kooning’s landscape “Police Gazette” & Woman III, with a 2006 purchase price of a little over US$63 million & $137.5 million respectively.