Lessons From the Man who Solved the Stock Market
The most successful money manager in the world
Jim Simons is a man of mystery. He has mathematician written all over him, from his undergraduate days at MIT to his doctoral days at Berkeley.
His past lives include being a code-breaker for the government, a pioneer of early topological quantum field theory, a recipient of the 1976 AMS Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, a researcher for communications and defense, and a teacher, ultimately heading the faculty for mathematics at Stony Brook University.
After all of that, he’s also the most successful hedge fund manager in history, a billionaire, and a philanthropist.
On Numberphile, he said that he owed some of his success to luck. But his background and his rise seem everything except lucky. For 30 years, the Medallion Fund has annualized 70% returns amassing over $100 billion in market gains at Renaissance Technologies.
Here are some of the best take-aways from the most successful market participant ever.