Interesting article in the latest BusinessWeek (7/21) about Steve Cohen, the barracuda-extraordinaire, billionaire head of the super-secretive SAC $4B hedge fund group. Did you know their fund pays out $150 MM a year in commissions? Well, I guess alot of that pays for early upgrade/downgrade tips from analysts. The fund's return this year is 13% (compared to the customary 40% returns) and Steve's mad as hell! Check out the pic of his mansion in Connecticut. An indoor skating rink? Sheesh!!
The article says "Cohen's biggest fund, with $1.8 billion in assets, trades furiously, turning over its portfolio 2.6 times a year" While the dollar amounts are huge, a turnover of 2.6 times per year equates to a holding period of 4 1/2 months. I think many Elite Traders could show Business Week a thing or two about "furious" trading!
And what's even more interesting is that Cohen posts here on EliteTrader under the handle Gordon Gekko. Really, no kidding.
Here's part of a post of Gordon Gekko's: <font class="quo"><blockquote><hr size="1">i recently bought a new computer and copied my old hard drive that has win xp pro on it. first of all, i'm good with computers. after my first attempt using norton ghost to clone the drive, when i tried to boot off the cloned drive, WINDOWS WOULD HALT. for a while i was really stumped. it wasn't the jumpers or anything. i kept searching the internet for help and i eventually found A VERY SIMPLE FIX. the problem is, if you use ghost and don't use a specific command line switch, when it clones the drive, i think ghost assigns the wrong drive letter to the drive and windows won't boot.</font><hr size="1"></blockquote><br /> This doesn't sound like it could be Steve Cohen. He's got an IT department for this stuff. He doesn't have to browse the internet to try to figure out how to use Norton Ghost. Steve Cohen to his CIO, "No, you go do that other stuff you do, I'll set up my new computer myself." Not.
No, no. MrMarket is one of Cohen's ex-traders who was fired for not following the rules. Didn't use stops. You didn't read the article? Cohen cuts his losses quickly. Too good for MrMarket, who, as we all know from his posts, is never wrong and has 15 inch biceps from holding up his trading platform all day while he does miles on his treadmill so he can look good in the pics on his web site. God, I wish I could be more like him.