medallionmen
The most profitable trading operation in the history of finance has been running for over three decades and the outside world’s understanding of how it generates its returns can be summarized in a single honest sentence: we don’t know. Not “we have a general idea.” Not “the broad
medallionmen
The numbers need to be laid out cold, without narrative, because the narrative instinct is to soften them into something that sounds plausible. They are not plausible. They are real, and the gap between what they describe and what any other investment vehicle in the history of organized finance has
medallionmen
The question is simple and the honest answers are uncomfortable. Jim Simons was 40 years old, tenured, running one of the best mathematics departments in the country, and permanently attached to a result that would be taught for centuries. He had won. By every metric the mathematical establishment uses to
medallionmen
Chern-Simons theory is one of the most important mathematical contributions of the twentieth century and almost nobody outside of graduate-level mathematics and theoretical physics has heard of it. This is not because the work is obscure in any meaningful sense. It is because the gap between what the work actually
medallionmen
In 1964, the Institute for Defense Analyses occupied a quiet floor in Princeton, New Jersey, and its primary function was one that most of the mathematicians working there understood implicitly but discussed rarely. The IDA was a Cold War signals intelligence operation. Its clients were the NSA and the Department
medallionmen
Jim Simons made more money than everybody. Not more than most hedge fund managers, or more than most billionaires, or more than most people who are good at math. More than everybody. The Medallion Fund, the vehicle he built inside Renaissance Technologies, has returned 66% gross annually since 1988. After
gamblingguide
The Bellagio pumps 100% outside air through its HVAC system, filtered and climate-controlled to a precision that most office buildings can’t match. The temperature holds steady at 70 degrees year-round. The lighting is engineered to suppress fatigue cues. The ambient noise sits at a level that behavioral research associates
gamblingguide
Watch a whale at a baccarat table in the Bellagio high-limit room. The bets are enormous; $50,000, $100,000 a hand. But the behavior is controlled. There’s a buy-in for the session. There’s a loss limit. There’s a walk-away point established before a single card was
gamblingguide
Every casino in America runs a loyalty program, and every loyalty program is built on the same premise: give back a fraction of what the gambler loses, package it as a reward, and create the psychological impression that losing money is a form of earning. The free buffet, the comped
gamblingguide
The legal sports betting industry in the United States is burning money to acquire customers. DraftKings spent $981 million on sales and marketing in 2023. FanDuel’s parent Flutter Entertainment reported customer acquisition costs in the hundreds of millions. BetMGM, Caesars, ESPN BET, Fanatics; every major operator is in the
gamblingguide
In 1938, B.F. Skinner put pigeons in boxes with levers and discovered something that would eventually underwrite a $300 billion global industry. The most effective way to maintain a behavior is to reward it on an unpredictable schedule. A pigeon that gets a food pellet every time it presses
gamblingguide
The casino put a decision tree inside a slot machine and nobody in management seemed to worry about it. The machine looks like every other machine on the floor. Same chair. Same screen. Same coin slot. A player sits down, presses buttons, watches cards appear, holds some, draws replacements, and