Stephen Cohen

Steven Cohen is an American hedge fund manager and businessman known for founding SAC Capital Advisors, one of the most successful hedge funds in Wall Street history, and its successor Point72 Asset Management, as well as for serving as the principal owner of the New York Mets Major League Baseball team.

Born in 1956 in Great Neck, New York, Cohen graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics in 1978. He began his career as an options trader at Gruntal & Co., where he managed proprietary trading desks for over a decade and developed a reputation for aggressive, high-volume trading strategies. In 1992, he founded SAC Capital Advisors with $25 million in initial capital, growing it into a powerhouse that averaged substantial annual returns and at times accounted for a significant portion of daily U.S. stock market volume. SAC Capital faced a major insider trading investigation that culminated in the firm pleading guilty to securities fraud and paying $1.8 billion in penalties in 2013, after which Cohen transitioned its operations into the family office Point72 Asset Management in 2014; Point72 later resumed managing external capital in 2018.

He grew up in Great Neck as the third of eight children in a Jewish family. His father was a garment manufacturer in Manhattan's garment district, and his mother was a piano teacher.