SAC Capital Advisors was a legendary and later notorious group of hedge funds founded and run by billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen. Launched in 1992 with just $25 million, it grew into a Wall Street leviathan, at its peak managing over $16 billion. SAC was renowned for its phenomenal returns, frequently delivering profits of 30% or more per year after charging some of the highest fees in the industry. The firm operated on a “multi-manager” platform, where dozens of individual portfolio managers traded separate pools of capital, creating a highly competitive internal market for ideas and performance. However, this remarkable success story was permanently tarnished by one of the largest insider trading scandals in history, leading to the firm's criminal conviction and eventual closure to outside investors. The saga of SAC Capital serves as a powerful cautionary tale about the perils of a culture that prioritizes performance above all else.
On paper, SAC's strategy was built on the mosaic theory. This is the idea of gathering numerous pieces of public and non-material private information—like a detective assembling clues—to form a unique investment thesis, or an edge (investing). SAC employed hundreds of analysts and portfolio managers who relentlessly sought out information, talking to company executives, suppliers, and industry experts. The goal was to know more about a stock than anyone else on Wall Street. However, investigations later revealed that this “edge” was often something far more sinister. The intense pressure to generate outsized returns—to produce alpha (investment)—created an environment where the line between diligent research and illegal information gathering became dangerously blurred. Instead of a patient, long-term approach, SAC's model was based on high-volume, short-term trading, a style fundamentally at odds with the principles of value investing.
The culture at SAC was famously demanding. Steven Cohen sat at the center of a spoked trading floor, personally overseeing risk and allocating capital.
This high-pressure system incentivized traders to push legal and ethical boundaries in their quest for an informational advantage, a path that would ultimately lead to the firm's downfall.
Starting in the late 2000s, federal investigators began to circle SAC Capital. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched a sprawling, multi-year investigation into a pattern of suspicious trades at the firm. The probe uncovered a systemic culture of insider trading. Several SAC employees were charged and convicted, including portfolio manager Mathew Martoma, who was found guilty in a scheme involving a clinical trial for an Alzheimer's drug that generated over $275 million in illegal profits and avoided losses. In 2013, the firm itself took the rare step of pleading guilty to criminal fraud charges. It agreed to pay a record-breaking $1.8 billion in fines and penalties and, most significantly, was forced to stop managing money for outside investors. While Cohen himself was never criminally charged, he was implicated as an “unindicted co-conspirator” and faced a two-year ban from managing public money from the SEC.
Forced to return all outside capital, SAC Capital Advisors effectively ceased to exist as a hedge fund. The firm was rebranded and restructured into Point72 Asset Management, a private family office dedicated to managing Cohen's vast personal fortune (estimated to be over $10 billion). The core trading infrastructure and many of the employees remained. After his supervisory ban expired in 2018, Cohen reopened Point72 to outside investors, marking his official return to the hedge fund industry, albeit under a new name and heightened regulatory scrutiny.
The story of SAC Capital is more than just a dramatic Wall Street tale; it offers critical lessons for the everyday investor.