Jim Simons

“Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance technologies and Elon Musk, and both of them, what they would do is when they needed time to think, they would find a quiet place, usually in the dark, and they would lay on their back flat. They can't see anything. They …”

“Jim Simon's son had a kid in my oldest child's class in high school, and I tried, I approached, I said, look, I can't do it unless you want me to do it. There's no point. And he said like, Dad, just like, no, no, no.”

“In the first seven years of Renaissance, which is now known as the premier quant trading fund around the world, but the first seven years, we also had about half the money in venture, and for the first five years, venture dominated the returns.”

“So he never hired a Anyone who knew anything about the markets, because he was hiring mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, astrophysicists, people who understood time series, number series, big data. And he didn't want them to be colored by thinking they…”

“And Jim once said to me, if somebody comes to me with a much better algorithm for trading, and another guy comes to me with a new source of data no one else has, I'm much more, I'd much rather pay for the data. You know, we'll figure out the algorithms.”

“Renaissance technologies, which goes on to make over a hundred billion dollars in profit and continues to make what I hear billions of dollars in profit every year to this day”

“Medallion scored a gain of 55.9% in 1990. A dramatic improvement on its four percent loss the previous year.”

“That, like, Jim Simons at Rentac versus, like, Robert Carroll, like, who would be a better earlier stage, early stage investor? And I think it's actually, like, Robert Carroll. Like, I think, like, literary nonfiction done really, really well, or journalism do…”

“Jim Simons, who made more money using math and data than anyone in history, said, be guided by beauty.”

“Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, RIP would famously speed everywhere. Because he just made the economic calculation that it's not worth it to him.”

“Not just is this the start of his entrepreneurial career, the seeds of this financially are what go on to start Rentech.”

“The charter of the group was that employees had to spend 50% of their time doing code breaking, but the other 50% of the time, they were free to do whatever they wanted, like research, pursue whatever they were doing in academia, publish papers.”

“So they come together and they publish a paper called Probabilistic Models for and Prediction of Stock Market Behavior. And everything that they suggest in this paper really is Rentech. Just 20 years before Rentech.”

“The Franklin Electronic Dictionaries? Yeah, that was one of their biggest investments. That one investment is half of Jim's net worth.”

“I think Jim made as much money from his investments in first round as Howard did from his LP stake in Rentech.”

“Over time, eventually in 2021, the IRS said, no, you made all those trades. That was not a completely separate entity. And so you guys owed 6.8 billion dollars in taxes that you didn't pay. You're going to need to pay that with interest, with penalties. And by…”

“We ran an exercise looking at all of our managers divided not by asset class, but simply by the liquidity terms, not even including private equity, but just the public managers who had annual or longer locks, who had quarterly locks, and who allowed monthly li…”

“Jim Simons would make absolutely no money if it weren't for leverage. That's just how, how it works.”

“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.”

“Prior to Jim was a man called Leon Levy, who was the chair of the investment committee. Brilliant investor. Ran the portfolio himself pretty much. Probably took risks that today under an institutional setting you could not take.”

“At the end of the hour, Jim looks at me, and he says, clearly, you know nothing about this job. I was sort of like in a state of shock. And then he says, but I like you. You're really smart. I'll give you the job.”

“I think people often forget liquidity, the fact that this institution must be able to survive the ups and downs. And I think this is where the low beta framework that Jim has always been a proponent of is very useful, in that when you have a high beta framewor…”

“So what's interesting is while at Rockefeller, we had put in a conflict of interest policy in place. It was one of the first things we did. And to be honest, I think it was one of the best things we ever did. So that we could actually not commit or invest in a…”

“Before he started trading full-time in 1978, he was one of the most acclaimed mathematicians, especially as a geometer over the past 50, maybe even a hundred years.”

“I think that's part of the reason why the returns have been so ridiculous is that he's a unique breed. He could do both, the quant side, the mathematics side, but also the personal and relate to people and manage people.”

“And they developed the system, an automated type system, early trading model, and it cornered the market for Maine potatoes.”

“He hired this young economist as a consultant named Alan Greenspan, and he had his red phone that went off when news broke and they would try to beat everybody else in trading kind of thing.”

“Henry Laufer was the key guy. So he was a mathematician, a very quiet, humble, really super smart, well respected, and almost acclaimed in that field. And he's the one who came up with different approaches, things like days of the week, comparing what trades w…”

“Simon's almost pulled the plug. He gave his guys six months, and he goes, guys, that's it. We're gonna pull the plug. I'll give you six more months.”

“He doesn't hire from wall street. He never has interest. If you worked on wall street, it's hard to get a job there. And that helps because when they leave, people don't usually go to wall street. So I don't know if I think he stumbled onto this. I don't think…”

“Medallion has been really only Jim Simons and his employees since around 2003. They kicked the last people out.”

“Simons, when he gives speeches to you, he talks about the key is they never override the model, and they don't usually override the model, almost never do, but as I write in this story in the book, there are times when Simons has stepped in and said, guys, we'…”

“What I mean by that is they're not just PhDs, and yet they have a hundred out of like 300 people there, their PhDs. These are people that are groundbreaking scientists, physicists, astronomers.”

“In some ways I was surprised that he didn't come up with the algorithms most of the time, but he's great at asking questions and prodding and pushing. And have you considered this? You might want to try this approach. So people internally say his genius is man…”

“He is the biggest funder of autism research”

“Simon's heard about it, and he was worried about morale, and he had to, and I write about a scene in the book, he had to go to Mercer and say, you got to step down, not necessarily leave the firm, but you can't run the firm because our morale is getting hurt, …”

“He's also trying to figure out whether the big bang took place. And so I'm interested in that too. We talk about that. They've got this big operation going on in Chile where they're trying to figure that kind of stuff out.”