Hedge Fund King Steve Cohen: Optimizing Time for Making $$$

There was almost no time in a twenty-four-hour day Cohen didn’t use for a moneymaking purpose, and he attributed much of SAC’s success to this work ethic.

Cohen got up early and studied the market at home before being driven to the office by 8 A.M. by a bodyguard in a gray Maybach.

He arrived to find a bowl of hot oatmeal wrapped in cellophane waiting on his desk.

His station at the center of the trading floor resembled a cockpit, with twelve monitors mounted in front of him.

Because Cohen’s time was so valuable, most activities—from haircuts to meetings—were scheduled so as to not distract him from his screens between 9:30 A.M. and 4 P.M.

“Everything happened at his desk,” said one trader who sat at his elbow for years. “Everything.”

[....]

Cohen was so focused on making sure that he had access to every piece of available information that he hired research traders to filter through his messages and make sure that he saw the important ones.

Any time he traveled to Las Vegas to visit his parents, or to Brown University, where Cohen was on the board of trustees, or on his yearly summer vacation with Alex, an advance team of consultants made the journey ahead of him.

He rented an extra room wherever he was staying and used it as a staging area where his staff re-created his trading station in such detail that he could hardly tell he was away from his office.

[....]

Every Sunday around noon, Cohen sat down at his desk in his home office with a yellow notepad in hand.

His portfolio managers called in one by one to pitch their best trade ideas for the upcoming week.

It was called the Sunday Ideas Meeting, and it was a source of constant anxiety among SAC’s employees.

Each conversation typically lasted five minutes, with Cohen’s research trader also joining them on the line to take notes.

Portfolio managers were expected to have a moneymaking idea to pitch him and an accompanying “conviction rating”—a way of conveying how sure they were that the investment would pay off.

'Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street' by Sheelah Kolhatkar
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07593WWJR