Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital lost money for at least the second straight month.
He dropped 1.3 percent in September after losing 2 percent in August.
Even so, he is up 6.5 percent for the year after rising more than 10 percent earlier in the year. Given his 50 percent performance fee, Cohen is still up 13 percent gross for the year, which makes him among the better performing hedge funds.
Little consolation for Cohen, however. “Steve’s not happy about it,” an SAC investor says.
Indeed, Cohen has a huge amount of his own capital in the firm — probably well in excess of $6 billion.
SAC currently has about $14 billion under management. As we reported at the time, on August 1 SAC instituted a “soft” close of his flagship fund.
Cohen, of course, is known for his rapid stock trading, making him one of the bigger commission generators on Wall Street.
In the third quarter alone, SAC lost more than 75 percent of its investment in Dendreon after the drugmaker withdrew its previous guidance of $350 million to $400 million in 2011 revenue for the prostate drug Provenge. SAC is the largest shareholder of Dendreon with 8.6 million shares at the end of June.
On the other hand, its biggest holding, Apple, surged nearly 14 percent in the quarter.
Financials, which generally took a big beating in the quarter, only accounted for 7 percent of SAC’s equity holdings.
Altogether, SAC had $17.4 billion invested in U.S. equities at the end of the second quarter, up from $16.3 billion, suggesting it used a fair amount of leverage.
