Jim Simons, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 120Ben Gilbert 22Michael Lewis 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Jim Simons comes up
Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:15:06 David Rosenthal So, Jim moves everything back to Long Island, sets it up as this academic paradise, is recruiting the smartest people in the world.
- ▶ 1:15:25 David Rosenthal So, not Jim's bogey of 80%, but still pretty freaking great.
- ▶ 1:16:07 David Rosenthal At the end of 1993, Simons decides to close the fund and not allow new LPs in.
- ▶ 1:18:23 David Rosenthal So, Simons decides the only thing we can do here to expand, which I'm such a believer in what we're doing, we need to expand, is we need to move into equities.
- ▶ 1:19:21 David Rosenthal And in 1993, one of the mathematicians that Jim had recruited to Rentech, a guy named Nick Patterson,
- ▶ 1:19:30 David Rosenthal Nick gets especially passionate about going out and recruiting new talent along with Jim.
- ▶ 1:22:12 David Rosenthal And Jim and Nick know that if they're gonna move into equities because of the volume of data and because of how much more complex that market is, they need more complex systems.
- ▶ 1:25:01 David Rosenthal So, Patterson and Simons go raid IBM.
- ▶ 1:33:44 David Rosenthal So there's a really fun story around this that really illustrates Jim's genius in managing the firm and the people.
- ▶ 1:34:42 David Rosenthal After this goes down, Peter Brown comes to Jim and offers to resign, given the losses that they incurred over these couple days, and Jim says, what are you talking about?
- ▶ 1:35:07 Ben Gilbert That illustrates Jim as a leader right there.
- ▶ 1:35:11 David Rosenthal There's a parallel story when Jim ultimately does retire in 2009 and Peter and Bob take over as co-CEOs, where a year or so before the quote unquote quant quake had happened, where similar to the tech bubble bursting, there was all of a…
- ▶ 1:35:45 David Rosenthal And Jim pumped the brakes and stepped in, intervened, and took risk off.
- ▶ 1:35:50 David Rosenthal And Peter goes to Jim again around the CEO transition and says, hey Jim, aren't you worried that with me running the place now, I'm going to be too aggressive and blow it up one of these days.
- ▶ 1:36:01 David Rosenthal And Jim says, no, I'm not worried at all.
- ▶ 1:44:53 David Rosenthal Yeah, there's a fun story around this that Peter Brown tells of Jim came into his office one day and said, Peter, I got a thought exercise for you.
- ▶ 1:45:21 David Rosenthal And so Jim says, yes, exactly.
- ▶ 1:52:58 David Rosenthal So, after the historic performance during the financial crisis, as I alluded to earlier, Jim retires at the end of 2009, and Peter and Bob become co-CEOs, co-heads of the firm in 2010.
- ▶ 1:53:18 David Rosenthal It had been at five for the last few years of Jim's tenure.
- ▶ 1:54:22 David Rosenthal And one way to look at it, which may not be the be-all and end-all, but I think is a good way to compare Jim's era at Medallion versus Peter and Bob's era.
- ▶ 1:54:33 David Rosenthal During Jim's tenure, Medallion's total aggregate IRR from 1988 when the fund was formed to 2009 when he retired was 63.5% gross annual returns
- ▶ 1:54:58 David Rosenthal During the post-Jim era, the Peter and Bob era, from 20 10 to 20 22 was when we were able to get the latest data.
- ▶ 1:57:39 David Rosenthal Now, lest you think that Rentec dollars are solely being funneled into one side of the political spectrum, Jim Simons is a major Democratic donor, as are many other folks at Rentec.
- ▶ 1:58:29 David Rosenthal Ultimately, Jim asked Bob to step down as co-CEO in 2017, which he did, but he did remain a scientist at the firm and a contributor to the models, even though he wasn't leading the organization with Peter from a leadership standpoint any…
- ▶ 2:07:44 David Rosenthal I think Jim talks about this, that, oh, I pay the fees just like everybody else.
- ▶ 2:11:16 David Rosenthal It's not like, you know, if that were true, then Jim would just own this thing forever.
- ▶ 2:17:23 Ben Gilbert And by the way, Jim Simons, we're going to want you and the other few partners to really bear the load of that.
- ▶ 2:17:30 Ben Gilbert So for Simons alone, he paid six hundred and seventy million dollars to the IRS in back taxes.
- ▶ 2:18:01 Ben Gilbert Forbes estimates that Jim Simons alone is worth about thirty billion dollars today, which kind of pencils with a bunch of other stats over the years that he owned about half of Renaissance.
- ▶ 2:34:17 David Rosenthal There's this really funny line that Jim and Peter and others will say when asked about why they only hire academics and not from, you know, Wall Street and whatnot, and they're like, well, we found it's easier to teach smart people the…
- ▶ 2:47:58 Ben Gilbert Jim Simons managed to drain thirty billion dollars into his own pocket out of everybody that he ever traded with.
- ▶ 2:51:18 Ben Gilbert That's just not Jim Simons.
- ▶ 2:51:27 David Rosenthal It was during one of the like sell-offs in the mid-twenty teens in the market where Jim calls the head of his family office.
- ▶ 2:51:34 David Rosenthal He's, you know, long retired from rent tech at this point, calls the head of his family office and says, what should we do with all the sell-off in the market?
- ▶ 2:51:41 David Rosenthal And it's like, you're Jim Simons.
- ▶ 2:51:44 Ben Gilbert You're Jim Simons.
- ▶ 2:56:14 Ben Gilbert Like, Jim Simons has been gone for a long time.
- ▶ 2:58:03 David Rosenthal Culture of managing an academic environment in a fashion like a lab, but without letting it spin into the frivolity of a lab that Jim Simons set up.
- ▶ 3:06:42 David Rosenthal First, huge thank you to Greg Zuckerman, author of The Man Who Solved the Market, the canonical book out there about Rentech and Jim Simons.
- ▶ 3:08:16 David Rosenthal Other people to thank Howard Morgan, who we spoke to, which was so fun to get a bunch of the first-round history from him, and then, of course, the, you know, founding of Rentech and partnering with Jim and investing in each other's funds…
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 32:23 David Rosenthal And I think his model for this was Jim Simons, who in 1982 started Renaissance Technologies and Rentech.
- ▶ 32:49 David Rosenthal Dude, Rentech and Simons is unreal.
- ▶ 33:06 David Rosenthal So, supposedly, the Core Medallion Fund, which is now all private capital of Rentech employees and Simons himself, like there's no outside investors, averaged a 66.1% annual return from 1988 to 2018.
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