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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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In 1993, the Medallion Fund stopped accepting money from outside investors. Every dollar that had been contributed by non-employees was returned. The fund became available exclusively to employees of Renaissance Technologies and their families. It has remained closed ever since. No amount of money can buy you in. No connection
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Nobody outside Renaissance Technologies knows. That is the first thing to say and the most important thing to understand. The fund has never published its methods. Former employees are bound by non-disclosure agreements so restrictive that violating them would be financially ruinous. The code is proprietary. The models are proprietary.
medallionmen
The Efficient Market Hypothesis says you cannot beat the market. Not that it is difficult. Not that it is unlikely. That it is, in a meaningful sense, impossible. Prices reflect all available information. Any apparent edge is either luck, survivorship bias, or compensation for risk you have not properly accounted
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Before Jim Simons built the most profitable fund in history, a math professor from Chicago figured out how to beat blackjack. Not with card tricks or gut instinct or the kind of feel-for-the-game mysticism that gamblers have been selling each other for centuries. Edward O. Thorp did it with a
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The hiring thesis at Renaissance Technologies is the most revealing thing about the firm that is publicly known, and it has been hiding in plain sight for decades. Jim Simons did not hire Wall Street people. He did not hire MBA graduates. He did not hire traders, portfolio managers, analysts,