A Profile of investing stock trader guru Steve Cohen

Steven A. Cohen in 1992 founded SAC Capital Partners, a $12 billion dollar group of hedge funds. While SAC closely guards its returns, published reports and people who have seen the fund's letters to its investors say that SAC had a gross return, before its fees, of at least 40 percent in every year since inception. While most hedge funds charge a fee of 20% to 30% percent of the annual returns, SAC keeps a staggering 50% percent!!

Cohen is known as the "hedge fund king" and regarded by many as the best stock trader ever. His fund contains approximately $3 billion of his own money. While he is known primarily as a short-term trader, in recent years he's been taking longer-term positions.

"After Wharton, Cohen headed to Wall Street, where he landed a job as a junior trader in the options arbitrage department at Gruntal & Co. in 1978. His very first day, he made an $8,000 profit, and eventually was netting around $100,000 a day for the firm, says his former boss there, Ronald Aizer. "He learned early on how to use the block-trading ability of the big firms" by watching their trades, says Aizer. By 1984, Cohen was running his own trading group at Gruntal, which he did until he set up SAC."-Stock Article Link

" Mr. Cohen's reputation rests on an investing style altogether different from the buy-and-hold strategy espoused by influential investors such as Warren Buffett. Mr. Cohen believes that by scrutinizing trading patterns of a stock -- by "watching the tape" -- it is often possible to predict how the stock will move in the coming hours or even days. For years, he jumped in and out of stocks -- sometimes without any knowledge of a company's fundamentals, or even what it did. It was akin to picking out rocks in a river by watching the currents swirl around them...

Classic "value" investors such as Mr. Buffett insist that what other traders are thinking and doing is of no consequence to sound investing. Mr. Cohen is his polar opposite. He spends long days at the office in black jeans and worn sweaters, glued to his computer screens as he personally trades upwards of 300 stocks. SAC's trading floor bombards him with information about what's going on in the market. He soaks it all up."-Stock Article Link

SAC's biggest Stock holdings as of June 30, 2007 in comparison to March.

company, market value, shares, share comparison to March.

ALCOA INC                     285,242    7,037,800 (up from 4,882,844)
ANHEUSER BUSCH COS INC        187,839    3,601,200 (up from 237,700)
BEA SYS INC                   107,946    7,885,000 (up from 709,775)
CABOT CORP                    213,382    4,475,300 (up from 201,203)
CHINA PETE & CHEM CORP        205,932    1,844,611 (up from 59,650)
COGNOS INC                     95,623    2,410,053 (up from 70,809)
FREEPORT-MCMORAN COPPER & GO  112,072    1,353,200 (down from 2,201,100)
GENENTECH INC                  88,333    1,167,500 (up from 106,000)
KINETIC CONCEPTS INC          124,728    2,400,000 (up from 1,153,500)
LYONDELL CHEMICAL CO          107,180    2,887,400 (up from 529,200)
MANOR CARE INC NEW            178,666    2,736,500 (NEW)
QUESTAR CORP                  102,281    1,935,300 (up from 1,251,400)
SEARS HLDGS CORP              144,397      851,900 (down from 878,165)