Social Rejection?: Hedgie Steve Cohen Wants Out of East Hampton
Smashmouth Investigative Journalism, 17 January 2014
The world’s most infamous trader wants to get out of East Hampton, NY. Yesterday I reported for the New York Observer that Stevie Cohen, of SAC Capital, is trying to broker a private deal to sell a $60 million ocean front home he bought less than a year ago. His reasoning, according to a person on the deal, is East Hampton is ‘too Jewish’ and he has instructed people to start looking for another home in other Hampton enclaves.
This one real estate transaction has fueled a social media debate about what he’s really doing. Having lived and worked among Cohen-ites and his SAC Captial traders for the last decade out in Connecticut’s gold coast I don’t think his comment is a signal of anything anti-Jewish. Instead I believe it shows his social network could be failing since the hedge fund he founded plead guilty to supporting a culture of massive inside trading.
Cohen paid the highest fees to broker dealers who moved his trades for over a decade but according to people who worked with him, starting from his early days a Gruntal & Co, they hated him because of the way he did business. I’ve been told stories of dealers at Lehman leaking other funds trade volume to Cohen and Cohen even funding smaller hedge funds to use them to create liquidity when he wanted to short a stock. The years of alleged cheating to beat the markets has left sour grapes in mouth of many on Wall Street. And now that he’s shutting down his large hedge fund his volume of fee paying to The Street will shrink. This could mean people aren’t as motivated to play friendly with the Cohens in their social time.
