Steven Schonfeld amassed a billion-dollar fortune by seizing on short-term market moves. Sitting in a Park Avenue office dressed in a black hoodie and white sneakers, the 55-year-old former stockbroker described a plan to compound his wealth by finding and funding a new crop of star traders.
Schonfeld Group Holdings already has 34 teams managing $7.5 billion of positions and is seeking to get bigger. His family office offers a home for top Wall Street portfolio managers as banks are constrained by new rules limiting trading for their own books. One of the biggest teams, Quantbot Technologies, which has been working for him for six years, is run by a nuclear physicist who helped establish electronic-trading platforms at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch & Co.
