raydalio
Your boss records your meetings. Grades your reasoning in real time. Posts the scores for the whole firm to see. You signed up for this. You wanted this. Or at least you told yourself you did, because the interview process was so psychologically intense that by the time you got
raydalio
All-weather isn’t a vibe. It’s an architecture. And it prints. That’s the sentence, and it’s accurate. Most hedge funds are bets dressed up in suits. They have a thesis, a positioning, a view on where the world is going, and they put money behind that
raydalio
Most people learn from their mistakes. Dalio built an institution around it. That sentence sounds like LinkedIn content. It isn’t. What Dalio did after 1982 is one of the stranger responses to professional catastrophe on record, and it matters because the response didn’t just save his career; it
raydalio
Ray Dalio lost everything in 1982. Bet the farm on a debt crisis call, got the timing wrong, had to borrow four thousand dollars from his father to pay the bills. The guy who would build the largest hedge fund in history was, for a brief and clarifying moment, just
medallionmen
The honest answer is no. Not the way they do it. The Medallion Fund’s returns are not replicable by an individual investor for the same reason that a weekend jogger cannot run a 9.58 hundred meters. The performance exists at a level that requires infrastructure, talent, data, and
medallionmen
Jim Simons died on May 10, 2024, at the age of 86, at his home in Manhattan. The cause was not disclosed publicly. The death was reported widely but briefly; a few days of obituaries and retrospectives, the standard treatment for a billionaire whose fame never quite matched his fortune.
medallionmen
Robert Mercer is the part of the Renaissance Technologies story that nobody in the quant world wants to talk about. Not because he’s obscure; he is one of the most consequential political donors in recent American history; but because his story breaks the comfortable narrative that quantitative finance is
medallionmen
Jim Simons spent the first half of his career breaking codes for the NSA and proving theorems that reshaped differential geometry. He spent the middle portion building the most profitable trading operation in financial history. And he spent the last two decades of his life trying to give the money
medallionmen
On May 6, 2010, at approximately 2:32 PM Eastern Time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average began falling. Within five minutes it had dropped nearly 600 points. Within the next five minutes it dropped another 400. At the nadir; a point reached at 2:47 PM; the Dow was down
medallionmen
The trading floor died the way most things die in finance: not all at once, but in a series of migrations that each seemed reasonable at the time and collectively amounted to extinction. The open outcry pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the NYSE specialist posts, the commodity rings in
medallionmen
In 1990, a computational biologist named David Shaw left Morgan Stanley and started a hedge fund out of a small office above a bookstore in Manhattan. He had $28 million and a conviction that computational methods could find market inefficiencies invisible to traditional traders. The fund would become D.E.
medallionmen
The quant revolution had an apostle problem. Jim Simons proved that mathematical models could beat the market. He also proved that the best strategies worked only at limited scale, inside a locked room, for a few hundred people. That is a powerful demonstration but a terrible product. You cannot sell