Hedge Fund Talent Schools Are Looking for the Perfect Trader
Amid a brutal hiring war, Steve Cohen’s Point72, Ken Griffin’s Citadel and other giant hedge funds are going in a radical new direction: Training schemes for in-house superstars.
Steve Cohen’s Point72 taps bright sparks anywhere from university to senior analyst level.
Photographer: Adam Hunger/AP Photo
More than a decade ago, hedge fund titan Steve Cohen and his portfolio manager Harry Schwefel sat huddled on SAC Capital’s busy trading floor. Schwefel was musing on how a run of lucky breaks had powered his rise at the firm. Cohen’s reaction: “We shouldn’t allow it to be luck anymore.”
Today he’s enjoying the fruits of that epiphany. The duo went ahead and constructed one of the hedge fund industry’s first assembly lines of top talent — in Cohen’s words by taking people you’d rank as a “nine” and making them perfect 10s. The result is a conveyor belt of polished high-performers who’ve helped him rebuild after a costly insider-trading scandal and to emerge on the other side with an empire whose coffers now boast $34 billion of client cash.