Ok, the title doesn’t cover everything. By now you all might have heard or read about the legend of Jim Simmons given the recent publishing of The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simmons Launched the Quant Revolution.
In case you haven’t, Jim Simmons is the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund. What makes Ren Tech special is that medallion one of their funds has had a amazing return that defies all know logic in the markets. Since 1988, Medallion has returned 66% annualized pre-fees. And even post fees, the fund has returned 39%. Typically hedge funds charge a 2% annual fee and 20% performance fee. But Medallion was charging a crazy, astounding, mind-boggling 5 and 44%
What’s even more crazier is that the fund has never had a negative year. The fund didn’t even lose money during the dot-com crash in the 2000’s and even during the global financial crisis of 2008. That’s just so insanely crazy. And no, the fund doesn’t do HFT trading. Their average trades are couple of days and they are long and short on thousands of stocks at the same time. The fund has been closed to outside investors since 1993 and has been open only to employees.
Here’s where Jim Simmons’ Medallion ranks among the pantheon of other great investors:
But the crazy part is, no one has figured out the secret sauce. But this paper is nice start to acquaint yourself with the legend of Jim Simmons
You can also listen to these podcasts:
You can also check out thebook by Gregory Zuckerman