Fireside with Steven Cohen, CEO, Point72 | Global Alts Miami 2025

Let's go downstairs to Steve, who's standing by with Mets owner Steven A. Cohen.

Steve Cohen.

Steven A. Cohen. Steven A. Cohen. Steven A. Cohen. Steven A. Cohen, the founder and CEO of Point72.

That firm raising $10 billion. Three decades as one of Wall Street's most successful hedge fund managers, the owner of the New York Mets, and the league's new heavy hitter.

Juan Soto to the Mets. Want to get something that starts with a seven, if not an eight.

$765 million. Just a stretch for me, you know, something different.

Do you like talking more about markets or talking about art?

If I go out with somebody in business and they happen to be a collector, we spend the first 30 minutes on art. The amount of effort, motivation, passion that's required to do extraordinary things don't happen by accident. They happen because you're determined.

Thanks for all being here. I'm John Ledecky, co-owner of the New York Islanders and a New York Mets fan as well. And we're going to divide our conversation into the Mets, something about Point72, Steve's view on AI, and then some wrap-up comments on the markets. But first of all, Steve, congrats on a great season. Um, I remember meeting you when you first bought the team in the middle of COVID, which I thought took a lot of guts and you went out, stood in front of Citi Field on Seaver Way and handed out literally hundreds, if not thousands of bags for folks as they drove by in their cars, because, you remember, you couldn't have that face-to-face contact, and somebody yelled, 'You're my Uncle Steve,' and it stuck.

So congrats on that first five years of ownership. What are the things that you've learned on that journey to today?

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It's only been—uh, this will be my fifth season. I call them dog years, especially early. I mean, we had some amazing things go—the first year, everything went wrong. But, uh, you know, listen, I had never been in sports, and, and, uh, you know, listen, you need patience. I mean, it's so easy to go spend money, and, you know, and I'm really thrilled that, you know, I have the right management team in place, and we're much more methodical and thoughtful about what we do. And listen, I mean, I enjoy talking to the fans. I mean, when you sit behind screens your whole life and then all of a sudden you're thrust into a public arena when you're involved with sports, it's totally a different experience.

So I think that the fans have gotten to know me, gotten to know who I am. I tell it straight. I don't pull any punches and just let chips fall where they may.

Yeah, I think your performance, if you will, on Saturday's FanFest, which was very heralded by the New York press for your honesty when it came to players and the future and what your plans were—what do you see in terms of thinking about the Mets in the context of your day job? Is there a correlation between that? Because when I go to your box, which, by the way, is the best dinner party in New York 81 times a year, there's such an eclectic group of people.

It's a free game, so anybody will come.

But how does that all come together in a mosaic for you? Was that part of your—I doubt it—but was that part of your decision-making process, that this was a way to bring all these different worlds together in one focused place?

No, I think that just happens organically. I mean, I've been in a lot of different subcultures: financial world, art world, philanthropy. Sports is another subculture. And New York is essentially just the media capital of the world, and people want to—they want to go to a game and hang out with the owner and get insight of what's going on behind the scenes. And so it tends to attract a lot of different people. I actually am tired of my suite being crowded, and I actually go and sit in the seats by the dugout and enjoy that a lot more than entertaining during the game, because I want to watch the game.

Well, I think your secret weapon in life is your wife, Alex, because she was smart enough to get a separate box. And what I love about what Alex does is that every game, she goes into the upper deck at Citi Field and she picks out fans to come sit with her. And she has probably been the best thing you've ever done in your life, if I look at it.

She's a special lady and the players love her, the fans love her, and she brings a real authenticity to what we're doing and she loves it. It's a family thing, right? So we get to do something together. Now it's not Steven A. Cohen owns the Mets, it's Steve and Alex Cohen owns the Mets, and I love that.

And one of the players who was prominently featured who signed a record contract when he was interviewed—who was that? A guy named Juan Soto.

Yes, those of you who don't follow sports, he signed a $765 million deal with, I think, some additional components to it for the next 15 years. But the Soto family made a point of saying that their decision was largely based on the fact that you and Alex run the Mets as a family.

Yeah, I still—I've never really asked Juan, 'Why did you join the Mets?' right? I mean, yeah, obviously he was at the Yankees and he has Aaron Judge behind him, you know, great hitter. And he's decided to come to the Mets, and, you know, one day I'll get the full answer. And it might have been the families. You know, we're a little bit, maybe a little bit more focused on treating the parents and treating the, you know, the kids and the grandparents and treating, you know, giving them a great experience at the Mets. And sort of my philosophy—well, it's my philosophy at my hedge fund, too, you know. I mean, we want to treat people as people, and they're human beings, and just like the way I'd want to be treated, I want to do it right back.

So speaking of hedge funds, Point72 today has 18 offices around the world, 3,000 employees, and over $37 billion in assets under management. The Wall Street Journal had a headline saying, 'Mets owner Steven A. Cohen had an even better year off the field. Flagship fund up 19%.' You've built an incredible investment business over the past three decades. What do you think has been the key to your success and longevity in that market?

Yeah, I think, well, listen, I started the business. I'm considered part of a group called multi-managers. We have 200 portfolio managers working for us around the world. And I think it's my philosophy on, you know, how to treat people. You know, I want to bring in the best talent I can. I want to support them. I want to—I want them to have—they owe me their life, you know, as long as they're at the firm. I want them to have an incredible experience. I want, if they leave, I want them to be ambassadors for the firm. I want them to say great things, and it's been my philosophy, and those are my principles, and I operate out of those. And so far, so good. We've been in business—this will be our 33rd year. And then, obviously, I was running a unit at a company, brokerage firm before that for about 14 years.

The decision, speaking of headlines, the decision last year that you made to stop trading got a lot of press. Can you tell us what led to that decision and how you're spending your time now, other than trying to win a World Series for the Mets?

I'm spending my time doing this, okay? I mean, I'm on the—I call it the rubber chicken circuit. And so, yeah, so I'm out and about. So yeah, I mean, I decided to stop trading because I had this vision. I'm 68 and had this vision of being 70, still behind screens. I was like, "That doesn't make sense." And I felt it was time to—I have so many employees. My firm has gotten to the point where I was also CEO of the firm, so I was running the Mets, CEO of the firm, and trading. And that was a lot to do. And I've been able to fill my time interacting with our people at the firm and the Mets much more than sitting in front of screens all day. It's hard to do something else. I describe it as being immersed in a video game.

And it's so immersive that you just forget what's going on around you.

By the way, a lot of these questions came to me via text from people who are interested in your business. And one of them is asking, you launched a private credit business. Can you tell us more about that and why you're launching that business now?

Yeah, listen, I mean, obviously, that's not a new thought in the world. There's plenty of credit businesses out there. But my view is that this firm is more than just a hedge fund. It can attract the best talent wherever it is. And I'm here to support them and try to figure out how to grow and partner in how to grow the stuff, the businesses that they want to grow. And it just happened, you know, I met somebody that I thought was, you know, really someone I could partner with. And, you know, so why define myself as just a hedge fund, you know, a multi-manager? I can do more than that.

Every day we're confronted with something new on AI. The markets this week have been very volatile, down and up on it.

What did stocks in AI do yesterday? Yeah. Not so good, right?

How is your firm thinking about AI longitudinally? In other words, there's the day-to-day choppiness, but what I think the folks again asking me questions to ask you have asked: what's your—the Steven A. Cohen view on AI in the future?

Listen, every once in a while there are technology changes that are, you know, sort of—they're not like one- or two-year themes. I mean, this is a 10- to 20-year theme. It's going to affect everybody in how they conduct their lives, how they do their business. And this is a massive shift. And so my view is we're still in the first, second inning of something that's going to be transformational for the economy and the world. And so, I mean, to me, that spells—just like when the internet first became something and the cloud became something that was important, this is the same thing. And the next great companies, and even companies that are out there today, public companies, private companies, these are going to be the next great companies.

And this is such a dramatic, important shift that to ignore it, I think, is a mistake. And so my view is, you know, we run a hedge fund, it tends to be a little bit shorter term, and, and, and, but this, because of what I believe is the duration of what this investment could be, that, you know, why not set up a separate entity that invests with a little bit more timeframe and duration? And so, you know, I think it's, you know, something that—you're going to read about it every day because it's coming, and it's coming quick.

You named your fund after an AI theorist named Alan Turing. It's called the Turing Fund. My concern about the future of AI is the journey to that place and the valuations that at least people in the media are reading seem stratospheric. Do you see, at some point, other than the Chinese thing yesterday, do you see sort of a choppy road? In other words, is it a hockey stick, just to use an analogy that I like, or is it going to have some chop to it?

I'm trying to think of a baseball analogy. So, yeah, listen, I mean, great companies are going to be expensive. There's no way around that. A great house is going to be expensive. A great piece of art is going to be expensive. And there are going to be a lot of winners here. And it's going to be episodic. It's not going to go in a straight line. I mean, there'll be advances, and then it goes quiet. And there'll be new companies that'll be able to use these tools, and you start hearing about them. And then another big advance comes along, and that's how it's going to go. And there are going to be moments when people are going to doubt it, like yesterday. And there's a lot of people who own these stocks who perhaps don't know what they own and why they own it, other than they know they should own some AI.

And so you get a lot of misinformation. It was the back page of the Post. They were basically like some crazy headline today on China versus the U.S. And so there's a lot of hype and a lot of—but people are going to care about this, so you have to really understand this stuff. And I'm lucky enough to have somebody who's running this fund who really understands this stuff cold, who really has the background to understand what this technology platform shift is all about. And there's a lot of people out there who talk who haven't done the work. And they can misinform investors and misinform the public. And we saw a little bit of that yesterday. Our view is what happened with DeepSeek is actually bullish because it advances the move to artificial superintelligence.

And that's coming. It's coming quick.

So, I'm going to shift to markets because you have made a lot of headlines on CNBC over the years, the few times you've been on TV talking about the markets.

I don't want to make another headline here. Huh? No headlines? I'm trying not to.

Well, there's another young man from Queens named Donald Trump, since the two of us are from Long Island, Queens.

Actually, my father-in-law used to sit right next to President Trump at the ball game. Cool. A little sidelight. That's a side note.

So, Trump administration, where do you think we are from an economic perspective as we move forward in the new administration?

Listen, I mean, you know, politics matters. And, you know, obviously he's come in, you know, and it's totally a different program than what, you know, obviously Biden was implementing. And, you know, I mean, we know what—we know what he's going to do. It's about tariffs. It's about immigration. It's about energy, right? You know, "drill, baby, drill." And it's about, you know, unleashing America. And so, you know, there's a lot—deregulation—there's a lot to like. The irony is, and this is interesting, that the policies that he's implementing, if he implements them—tariffs, specifically, tariffs and immigration—will actually slow growth, not increase growth in 2025. Tariffs are a tax, and that's going to slow consumer spending.

And immigration, if you slow immigration, it slows the supply of workers. And so the economy, we think, is going to grow first half 2.5%. Unemployment rates stay around 4.1%, 4.2%. And then the second half, we actually think things are going to slow. and that we think growth will slow maybe to 1.5%. And on top of that, we think the employment rate will go down because the flow of immigration, supply of labor, is being constrained. And so we think it's gonna be hard for the Fed to hit their inflation targets. We think inflation will stay sticky around 2.6%, 2.5, 2.7, with their goal being two. And on top of that, an employment rate that's coming down while growth is slowing. And so I don't think that's a great backdrop in 2025.

I would expect the markets to top over the next couple months if it hasn't already topped already. And I would expect the second half to be a little tougher.

You talked a lot about labor and talent. One of the questions from a hedge fund competitor of yours that I got was the war for talent in the hedge fund space continues to be unusually fierce. How is that playing out from your perspective? How has it impacted recruitment and retention efforts in the hedge fund industry?

Yeah, listen, there's a lot of firms competing for great talent, and no different than baseball or hockey, right? Great talent gets paid a big price. And we do a lot of development, so we're not depending on attracting people from other firms. We develop great talent. We have all sorts of developmental programs, starting when kids are coming out of school. We call it the Academy. PM development programs, we have analyst development programs, and we're really trying to train the next great investor. And just like the baseball analogy, it's cheaper to develop your players from within your organization as opposed to buying them. The same thing's true in the hedge fund world. And we'll participate in both arenas, but my preference is to develop.

So you actually went into the marketplace once and bought some players, and then you brought on an incredible talent in David Stearns, focusing back on the Mets and how it relates to the hedge fund world. What did you learn from that that applies to you moving forward as you try to go for a world championship? In other words, you had a couple of guys who came in and didn't work out, and you retrenched, and you didn't think you would get to where you are as quickly as you have. And we've had our conversations. Sounds like you're ahead of your plan. So what happened there? What's the mosaic of running a team, whether it's a hedge fund or a baseball team? Yes, it takes talent, but how do you discern that that's...

You competed for David Stearns. You won David Stearns, who you speak highly of as the president of baseball operations guy. So how does that all come together?

Well, I think we've been making progress even before David came along. And it's really important in almost anything you do not to focus on the outcome, but focus on the process. And if you're improving the process, the results come later or they come at some point. And so that's what I've been focused on. I mean, baseball teams—I mean, I'm sure hockey teams are no different—they're small businesses, and they don't—there aren't that many players, but they're complicated, right? I mean, you've got technology, you've got training and healthcare, training your players, you've got analytics, you've got player development, you've got scouting. I mean, it's pretty complicated. And so how do you pull that whole thing together?

And the idea, no different than hedge funds, is to hire the best and brightest and then obviously hold them accountable. And so it's a work in progress. I mean, the Mets are not where I want them to be yet. But we're a lot further along than we used to be. And, you know, we'll get there. And we'll get there because we're putting the right people in place. And they know how to do it. And they've done it before. And, you know, track records do matter. And so, you know, those type of people I look for. And then, you know, ask good questions. As an owner, like, you have all this going on. I mean, I can't—I can't be involved in every part of the Mets organization. But what I can do is ask good questions and try to figure out what we're doing well and what we need to improve on.

And that's no different at my hedge fund or any business. And that's what a CEO does.

And again, now more in a macro sense, what are you worried about these days? How do you think about each and every day? What gets you to hesitate or be thoughtful, or what are the things that get you excited when you wake up in the morning—jumping out of bed, going to it?

I don't jump out of bed quite. But yeah, I'm excited about being engaged in the stuff I'm engaged in and how to make it better and learn new things. And all of a sudden, I'm expanding the definition of my hedge fund. I've gotten involved with the PGA Tour. And obviously, that's in a period of transition. And the TGL, which happens, my team's not doing particularly well, but there's always next year. So there's always cool things to do and just a question of what you want to tackle and what your bandwidth is. And you basically apply the same principles. I mean, they're not different. And so these are principles I kind of live by and apply them where I can, and it holds me in pretty good stead.

You and I have had a chance to talk about philanthropy in the past, and one of the things I found so interesting: you're committing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars quietly to various causes throughout New York.

Well, you're committing them, but you don't wave a banner saying, 'I just did that,' which is nice. But here's the point I was going to make, which is you said to me, which will stick with me for a long time, that, 'Yes, I love being philanthropic, but it's no secret that I lose money on the Mets, but the chance to win a world championship... In philanthropy, I can make a specific group or thousands or maybe even 100,000 people, their lives better, their situation improved. But if I win a world championship, not only in New York, but across the country, there are millions and millions and generations of Mets fans.' And I wondered how you, you know, can you give some more detail on how you thought about that?

Because to me, sports, the brands have been, before the new wave of owners, have been really, like you said, mom-and-pop, undermanaged businesses. Now these brands, because they're worth billions, are getting more attention from Madison Avenue, from media, etc.

Well, these are still small businesses with big valuations. And it's the power of sport, right? No one cares that I run a hedge fund. No one could care less. The first thing they want to ask me about: 'Are you going to sign Alonso?' or, 'Hey, that was great with Juan Soto.' I mean, that's what they care about. Sports has that unifying community ability that a lot of things don't.

But you and Alex had a platform before you bought the Mets. How are you and Alex thinking about incorporating philanthropy into that platform for the betterment of—because to your point, you get a lot more attention, Steve, than you did five years ago. Everybody in the room knew who you were, but society writ large didn't necessarily know who you were unless they watched television.

It's not about getting attention. It's about... I mean, you said it, and I said it in my first press conference. This is an opportunity, if the Mets are great, to make millions of people happy who are just die-hard fans. And it doesn't like Flint. So we do a lot of Flint. We do a lot of things in a lot of different places, true philanthropy. This is a stretch in philanthropy. That's how I'm trying to justify losing the amount of money I'm losing. I'm losing. All right, well, I'm trying to make people happy. But I mean it. I took over a club that was like this kind of tarnished diamond. How do I polish it up with fans that are everywhere I go? Especially last year, I mean, we became America's team.

It was like a magical run that we had. And so how do I take it and go all the way? And listen, I'm just setting a goal. You know, just to accomplish it, right? I mean, to do something that seems hard or seems, how do you do that and pull it off? And there's no guarantee I'm gonna pull it off, but if I do, it's cool, you know? And like I said, I've made millions of people happy.

Well, I think everybody in this audience who likes the Mets, and I know there's a lot of folks from the New York area here this week, they're grateful to you for your stewardship of the team, excited for them and us watching you continue to progress. And it takes a village, like you said. It takes a lot of talent on and off the field to make it happen. So let's go Mets and have a great 2025. Thank you, Steve, for your time today. Thank you, John, for doing this.

Yeah, appreciate it. All right. Thanks, everybody.