I’d been avoiding mentioning the by-now famous clip of Steve Cohen on a talk show back in 1992, because it seems like a low blow. I mean, hit the guy over the head on insider trading, but don’t worm around in the trash can for dirt on him. Of course, he did put himself on the show…
But, either way, there’s one angle that is relevant.
If you’re billed as the most secretive guy in the hedge world, presumably because you’re a reclusive, crowd-shy financial genius, what does it say that you once got onto a TV show called Cristina of none-too-distinguished caliber to discuss intimate details of your personal life?
Hmm. That’d hardly what I call shrinking violet material.
Here, sans video (because we don’t drag people’s families in the mud on this blog) is the lowdown at New York Magazine:
“Shortly after they were married in 1992, Steve Cohen, the notoriously secretive hedge-fund manager at SAC Capital, and his second wife, Alex, went on the short-lived English-language version of the popular talk show Christina. The episode? “He Acts Like Her Husband!” The subject discussed? Steve’s too-close relationship with his ex-wife, Patricia Cohen, who recently filed a $300 million lawsuit against him.”
Think about that for a moment.
Psychologically, that doesn’t make any sense for a reclusive genius…
But, just suppose, what you have here is not a shy geeky genius (or maybe, I should qualify that – not solely a shy geeky genius) but a guy who was quite at home at a shady broker called Gruntal & Co. in the 1980s – a broker that had ties to the Russian mob and to a whole set of players to whom ‘reclusive’ and ‘shy’ are the last words you’d apply. Just suppose what you have here is a guy who was a player in that crowd….making his way any way he could. And just suppose, that past is why he keeps a low profile…
Just suppose.
It’s at least a distinct possibility.
But what’s more like a high probability is that anyone who puts out an article on Steve Cohen like this one or this one by John Carney has lost quite a bit of his credibility on Steven Cohen and on a few things closely related like, say, insider trading…or naked shorting….
Carney’s explanation why Steven Cohen can have done no wrong? A SAC trader told him so. That’s why.
“The trader described the enormous, football field sized trading floor at SAC as “the cleanest in the biz.”
A SAC trader says SAC is 100 percent clean. Because?
Well, that part of it isn’t mentioned in the article, although a lot of other stuff which sure as heck sounds super close to insider trading is.
“When I was there, we put tons of pressure on our brokers to make sure they gave us any information they had fast and first,“
And what was that John Carney was calling Matt Taibbi only a couple of months ago?
Naive?