Steve Cohen Forced To Pretend He Needs Help With Stuff

A few months ago, Steve Cohen brought Doug Haynes in to run his world-class family office, replacing the long-suffering Tom Conheeney. And even though he had just taken over a **wink, wink** family office, Doug just couldn’t help himself: He wants to be president of the best goddamned asset management entity on God’s green earth, he allowed.

Well, even when you’re perhaps the biggest family office on that earth in terms of employees, all of whom can invest san blood-or-marital relations to Clan Cohen, it’s hard to be the premier asset manager in the world when you’re managing money for so few people, only one of whom really has got a lot of scratch. So someone, perhaps, had an idea: Let’s create some new, extremely well-heeled “employees” who can drop by for coffee a couple of times a year and maybe throw nine or 10 figures our way. You know, just to grease the machine until we can get out from under this trading-for-other-people interdict. We’ll call it an advisory board.

Now, we all know that Steven A. Fucking Cohen doesn’t take advice from anyone. He gives it. And he’s always right. So that whole story doesn’t really fly. But now that they’ve been caught planning said “advisory board,” they’ll just have to go through with and stick with the story, even as the erstwhile SAC’s post-guilty plea reorganization already has it looking, bureaucratically, like a government agency.

Such a move, which Mr. Herr said now isn’t on the table, would have expanded Point72’s existing investor base to include a small number of nonemployees with significant wealth. At the same time, people inside Point72 including Michael C. Sullivan, a longtime SAC policy executive who has helped form the advisory-board plan, and lawyers for the firm discussed the potential for such a move to irk regulators, the people said.

Mr. Herr said that “to the best of [his] knowledge,” allowing advisory-board members to invest was “at no point” under discussion, and that the board has never been intended “as a means to get around the restrictions to which we are subject.”

Steven A. Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management to Create Advisory Board [WSJ]