Mets Owner Steve Cohen Had an Even Better Year Off the Field
Hedge fund Point72 to return as much as $5 billion in profits to investors and raise fees
Steve Cohen’s New York Mets lost to a playoff rival to end their 2024 baseball season. The billionaire’s hedge fund, meanwhile, topped the competition.
Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management generated a return in 2024 of about 19% in its flagship fund, according to people familiar with the matter. It outperformed funds from Citadel, Millennium Management and other peers as well as indexes tracking the broader hedge-fund industry. In 2023, Point72 gained 10.6%.
That run left Point72 with one of Wall Street’s good problems: having too much investor cash to deploy. The firm has told clients it would hand back to them between about $3 billion to $5 billion in profits in early 2025, the people familiar with the matter said. It managed $35 billion in assets in mid-2024.
Investors were satisfied enough with recent returns to OK an increase in fees. Rather than charge a fixed management fee, firms like Point72 pass on some or all of the costs of running their funds to investors, an amount that can vary year to year.
Going forward, Point72 clients will foot the bill for certain costs that Cohen previously covered, the people familiar with the matter said. The change will likely boost the expenses investors bear by a few tenths of a percentage point of fund assets.
At the top of today’s hedge-fund hierarchy are large multimanager firms like Point72, Citadel and Millennium that divvy up money across scores of specialized teams and constrain risk-taking to produce more dependable returns. They have also come to account for a disproportionate share of hedge-fund jobs, and their trading has an outsize footprint in the stock market.
Citadel’s main fund gained 15.1% in 2024, people familiar with the matter said. Millennium gained 15% and Balyasny Asset Management, another big multimanager firm, gained 13.6%, the people said. A composite hedge-fund index compiled by research firm PivotalPath was up 10.8% for the year, while the total return of the S&P 500 index was 25%.
Many pension plans, foundations and other hedge-fund investors prefer the steadier performance of multimanager firms to boom-or-bust hedge funds where home-run years can be followed by strikeouts.
Cohen, worth about $21 billion according to Forbes, has plowed much of his hedge-fund fortune into the Mets. He purchased the team for about $2.5 billion in 2020 and spared no expense to upgrade its roster to compete for a World Series title. Once a publicity-shy figure, Cohen now shares his thoughts on the team and messages with fans on the social-media platform X, where he has nearly 300,000 followers. Many affectionately call him “Uncle Steve.”
After the Mets lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in last year’s playoffs, Cohen signed superstar outfielder Juan Soto to a 15-year, $765 million contract. It was the richest deal for a player in sports history.
A few months ago, Cohen decided to stop trading his own portfolio to focus on running and building out Point72. He recently hired a former Blackstone executive, Todd Hirsch, to lead an expansion into private credit, among the fastest-growing corners of Wall Street.
Point72 also launched a stand-alone stock-picking fund in October dedicated to artificial-intelligence companies that Cohen planned to stake with $150 million of his own money, according to an investor presentation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The fund, called Turion after AI theorist Alan Turing, will hold stocks for longer and be more exposed to market swings than Point72’s main fund. Turion gained about 14% in the final three months of 2024.
Multimanager firms are so flush with capital that finding opportunities to put that money to work has become more challenging. Millennium and others are allocating billions of dollars to outside hedge funds, while Citadel in prior years also decided to hand back billions to clients.