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Can You Actually Do Any of This?
The practical close. What individual investors can extract from the quant worldview without a PhD. Factor investing, systematic rules, and knowing you're the fish at the table.
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His Death and What It Means
Simons died May 2024. The story is now closed, the mythology locked. What does it mean to have cracked the code, refused to explain it, and then left?
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The Political Inheritance
Robert Mercer. Co-CEO of Renaissance; bankrolled Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and Trump 2016. What the Mercer story reveals about what happens when pattern-detection people get interested in politics.
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He Gave It All Away — Sort Of
The philanthropy. Simons Foundation, Math for America, funding basic science at a scale that rivals the NSF. The question of whether you can launder a closed-club fortune through open science.
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The Flash Crash and What Quants Did to Markets
The 2010 Flash Crash, 2015, 2018 Volmageddon, and 2020 COVID crash. When thousands of algorithms pattern-detect simultaneously, feedback loops emerge that nobody designed.
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Two Sigma, Jane Street, and the End of the Floor
The firms that inherited the quant world and what they turned it into. Jane Street in particular is the new black box. The floor trader is dead. This is what killed him.
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D.E. Shaw Hired Jeff Bezos and He Quit to Start Amazon
David Shaw built a quant empire; recruited the best minds; and one of them left to start the biggest company in the world. What that says about D.E. Shaw's culture; what Bezos learned there; and the strange genealogy of tech and quant finance.
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Cliff Asness and the Disciples
What happens when Simons-adjacent ideas go institutional. Asness takes factor investing to AQR; raises hundreds of billions; and tries to democratize the quant edge. What's lost in translation. Also: Asness's public feuds are phenomenal MSN material.
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The Fund That's Closed Forever
Medallion stopped taking outside money in 1993. It's only open to employees and their families. Why? Because the strategy has capacity limits — it only works at a certain size. This is the most important and least discussed fact about it. It also means the people who got rich are a permanent closed
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What Is the Medallion Fund Actually Doing?
The best reconstruction. The leading hypotheses: mean reversion at millisecond scales; momentum signals too small for humans to see; cross-asset correlations nobody mapped; behavioral patterns that repeat because humans don't change. Probably all of it simultaneously. What the signal-extraction worl
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The Feud That Wasn't — Simons and the EMH Guys
Efficient Market Hypothesis says you can't beat the market consistently because prices reflect all available information. Simons beat the market consistently for 35 years. The academics either say the sample is too small (it isn't); the fees hide the alpha (they don't); or they just go quiet. What t
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Ed Thorp Did It First
The origin story of quant investing predates Simons. Thorp figured out blackjack with math; got banned from casinos; looked at markets and thought same problem. Built a fund that worked. Simons knew Thorp. The intellectual lineage. Thorp is the missing prologue.