- Steve Cohen, the billionaire owner of the New York Mets and legendary hedge fund investor, says that early in his career, he “hated his weekends” because he was so eager to get back to the trading desk. That kind of passion is what separates greatness from mediocrity, he said.
For billionaire investor Steve Cohen, too much work is never enough.
Cohen, 68, is currently chairman and CEO of hedge fund Point72 Asset Management as well as the owner of the New York Mets baseball team. Forbes pegs Cohen’s net worth at just over $21 billion. Success is no secret for Cohen, who recently appeared on his firm’s podcast, Becoming a Hedge Fund Analyst: Inside Point72 Academy.
Cohen stepped away from investing clients’ capital as a portfolio manager at Point72 earlier this year. He has been at the helm of Point72 since he founded it in 2014, and now will he remain co–chief investment officer alongside Harry Schwefel.
“Steve continues to serve as the firm’s co-CIO, but he is taking a break from trading his own book as he feels he can have a greater impact by focusing on running the firm, driving strategic initiatives, and mentoring and coaching the next generation of talent,” Tiffany Galvin-Cohen, Point72 spokesperson, told Fortune in a statement.
As a young trader, Cohen was passionate about the markets, so throwing his all into the business was an “easy decision” for him. It also came before a personal life. “I couldn’t wait for Mondays,” he said on the podcast. “I mean, I hated my weekends because I couldn’t wait to get back and for the markets to open.”
He compared that tenacity to what he sees in his top-performing baseball players on the Mets. “They can’t wait for spring training. They can’t wait to work, even in the offseason, because they love it,” Cohen said. “When you look at the professional golfers, they’re practicing on something, trying to improve, looking at the data, saying, ‘I can be even better.’ They’re in a constant state of improvement. That’s because they love it.”
‘Set a bigger goal’
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Cohen, one of eight children, began his investing career as an options trader on Wall Street, where his keen skills and trading savvy caught the attention of his superiors. He reportedly made an $8,000 profit on his first day at work, and soon began making his company up to $100,000 a day. Today, Point72 employs 3,000 and manages nearly $36 billion in assets.
Point72 “never” would have reached $36 billion in assets under management without that philosophy, Cohen said. “I always describe it as, you get to the top mountain, [and] there’s just nothing there. So you’ve got to do it again. Set a bigger goal.”
He went on to attribute his success to some of his inherent traits, including being “entrepreneurial by nature” as well as a “culture guy.”
“I feel like I owe the people my firm,” he said. “As much as I need to give to them, they need to give to me. We want to be a performance culture. I don’t want to settle for mediocrity. I don’t like being mediocre.”
Many managers end up flaming out, or enjoying a short career before moving on to a new venture. Cohen says staying power—his and other people’s—stems from passion.
“You can’t do a job and not love what you do,” he said. “If you don’t love it, or you’re not motivated by it, it’s going to be reflected in the work you do.”
‘A constant state of improvement’
To get ahead in business, Cohen told Schwefel on the podcast, “you’ve got to be forward-thinking. I don’t like resting on our laurels and what we’ve done. I used to drive my management teams crazy because we’d have a great year, and I wasn’t satisfied, because I knew we needed to make changes to sustain the success we were having.”
Cohen’s own career has had highs and lows. After a career debacle involving insider trading allegations at his firm in the mid-2010s, he stopped managing outside investors’ money for two years before starting his current firm.
Being amenable to change is essential for success in business, Cohen said. “We want to be in a position to take advantage of how the world changes, and what the new technologies and techniques are, and figure out how to deploy them within the firm and ultimately make it a better, more profitable, larger firm.”
Things don’t happen by accident, Cohen added. “They happen because you’re determined to be in a constant state of improvement.”
The best kind of young traders, he said, share that basic enthusiasm. “I always describe Point72 as, if I were new in this firm, I’d be a kid in a candy store, trying to [absorb] all the wisdom, all the people that are doing all these interesting things in this firm, and trying to learn from them,” he said. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you’ve got to learn new techniques, new ways of doing things, and ways of looking at the world—and that’s exciting.”
