Investing

Gabe Plotkin’s Wild Ride Reveals the Perils of Betting on a Star Trader

Contrarian stock-picker’s fund kept clients and staff on toes
That culminated in May with surprise decision to shut it down

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By Dawn Lim, Hema Parmar, and Katherine Burton

June 2, 2022 at 12:57 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Gabe Plotkin’s trading hand was so hot for so long that Steve Cohen, one of Wall Street’s most prominent investors, decided to break his own rule.

Cohen generally doesn’t like staking people who leave his hedge fund, nor does he farm out much of his wealth to other managers, but he did so repeatedly for his one-time protege. Plotkin got a $200 million check from Cohen to start his own firm in 2014, and more last year when he ran into trouble with meme-stock traders.