Point72 Is Ready to Party Just as Wall Street Takes Social Pause

(Bloomberg) -- There are parties that puff up egos. And there are parties where the draw is puffing.

At the Point72 Giant Balloon Inflation Party Saturday afternoon in Stamford, Connecticut, thousands are expected to watch balloon versions of Elmo, Shrek and Peppa Pig inflate with helium for a Sunday parade.

The giant of the title describes the 16 character balloons -- only one less than in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Stamford’s by the way used to be called the UBS Parade Spectacular, but not this year. UBS has dramatically reduced its work force in the Connecticut city where Tudor Investment Corp. will relocate from Greenwich next year.

Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management underwrites the inflation event. On Saturday, Fred Flintstone and Paddington Bear will expand while the comic daredevil Bello Nock (who shot out of a cannon on “America’s Got Talent”) entertains. There will be stilt walkers, face painters and hot chocolate for sale.

“It’s lots of feel good and happiness,” said Sandy Goldstein, president of the Stamford Downtown Special Services District, which has organized the festivities for about two decades. “I reached out so many years ago to Steve and Alexandra Cohen and they were very gracious, they came aboard. The people in their company come en masse.”

Local Pride

Before it was the Point72 Giant Balloon Inflation Party it was called the SAC Capital Advisors Giant Balloon Inflation Party. Cohen opened Point72 to manage his own fortune after a U.S. government insider-trading probe forced him to shutter his hedge fund. SAC pleaded guilty to securities fraud and paid a record $1.8 billion fine. Cohen wasn’t charged with wrongdoing, and the regulatory ban on his managing money lifts next year.

That means that by Thanksgiving 2018, this helium-fest could mark Cohen’s comeback, with a different sponsor name: Stamford Harbor Capital, Cohen’s new firm. Conveniently for this occasion, it’s a moniker that projects local pride.

“We are proud to continue to support the Stamford Thanksgiving parade,” Jeanne Melino, Point72’s director of community matters, said in a statement. “We believe strongly in contributing to the communities in which we live and work.”

Social Pause

The arrival of turkey day means parades, as well as a giant sigh of relief for those who attend charity galas. It’s been high season for such affairs, which will soon sputter out in favor of more private holiday parties. So Thanksgiving is a much-needed social pause.

However, there is one advantage of November gala-going: it fills you with tidbits of knowledge, and maybe some names to drop, when the family conversations get awkward. Here are some of the ones I plan to share:

My boyfriend’s father is a physicist, so I will tell him about meeting Michael Douglas -- not the actor, but the string theory expert who left academia to work at Renaissance Technologies. Douglas has known Renaissance founder Jim Simons since he was a kid: his dad was on the faculty of Stony Brook with Simons, and Douglas in his teen years learned to code on one of Simons’s computers.

Lately his extracurricular activity has been as chairman and president of Friends of IHES, supporting the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France, where both he and Simons have conducted research. It was at a Nov. 7 benefit for IHES that we met, and I got to watch Douglas coax his RenTech colleague Vincent Della Pietra into bidding for art made with artificial intelligence.

If anyone says I look slimmer, I’ll say it’s because I only ate half the burrata at Rockefeller University’s Celebrating Science benefit on Wednesday, inspired by the skinny Nancy Kissinger and Tali Weinstein. I’ll make sure to tell the hobbyist investor in the family that the event honored the Sohn Conference, which gathers rock stars in finance to share investment ideas and raise money for cancer research. Some of the proceeds helped buy a microscope at Rockefeller, called the Ira Scope after the conference’s namesake, Ira Sohn, who died of cancer. 

And then there’s the musical about falling in love that I’ll be nattering on about, rather selfishly, since it’s only up through Sunday. I saw the City Center Encores! production of “Brigadoon” on Thursday, after observing the magical effect it had on City Center gala guests Wednesday. Let’s just say they, cast members included, were an extremely friendly and happy-looking crowd when I found them at their post-performance supper at the Plaza. Yup, that’s what a visit to Brigadoon, a hidden-away Scottish village, will do for a jaded New Yorker.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Alan Goldstein

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