Jim Simons

“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.”

“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.”

“He is the biggest funder of autism research”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 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, …”

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

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

“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'…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”