Secrets of the Greatest Hedge Fund of All Time (2024)

Jim Simons passes away but the lessons from his career are with us forever

Renaissance Technologies is the greatest hedge fund in the history of Wall Street. No one made more money over more years through more market environments than Renaissance. It is estimated that over the course of its history, the fund has pulled over $100 billion in trading profits out of the stock market, as a magician might pull your card from the middle of the deck, over and over again, as the rest of the audience keeps wondering how he does it. We still don’t know.

What makes the story even more fascinating is how quietly it was done. The firm is based out on Long Island, 60 miles east of Wall Street. Its founder, Jim Simons, kept industry people far away from his secluded offices and kept his employees completely separate from Wall Street. His “traders” were PhD mathematicians and data scientists, not guys from Goldman or SAC or Morgan. Simons was a code breaker and math scholar who had come to the idea of using pattern recognition and statistics to play the market decades before it became obvious to everyone else.

Jim Simons passed away at the age of 86 this week. While accepting an award in 2022, he said of his life “I did a lot of math. I made a lot of money, and I gave almost all of it away.”

Great quote. There was a lot more to it than that…

There is no story like this anywhere on Wall Street. If you haven’t heard it yet, this is your chance.

A few years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman’s book about Renaissance Technologies and Jim Simons came out and was a huge hit. We had Greg on to tell us the story and it became one of the biggest videos we ever did, with over 330,000 views and counting. If you missed it the first time or you forgot about all the amazing facts and anecdotes Greg shared with us, you can watch it below.

That’s all from me today, talk soon! - Josh