medallionmen
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,
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