Jim Simons (full length interview) - Numberphile

If you found this interview interesting, there is a longer interview that goes into most of the same topics as well as several others here this video

The title makes it out like he is a reclusive lone wolf programmer. He is the CEO of renaissance technologies, a hedge fund with 275 employees. I really feel misled and like they trying to portray him as a mysterious, dangerous loner. As a computer programmer, I take offense. Here is an interview with James Simmons, the founder of Renaissance, fascinating guy. this video

Ah, now I understand. For others: Simons Foundations --> James Simons, who is a hedge fund mananger worth ~ $14billion. Excellent interview with Numberphile here: this video

For anyone interested in a great story about a world class mathematician who built a company that has used algorithms to beat the market for the last few decades, James Simons has an impressive record: link this video link One other thing, the Simons Foundation funds Quanta Magazine, whose articles frequently appear on HN: link

Article is about this book that will be released on Tuesday. link This Numberphile interview with him is interesting: this video

> The Medallion fund has been closed to external capital since 1993, and analysis of the flagship fund’s annual returns suggests that significant distributions are made each year to keep the fund about the same size. For example, despite the fact that Medallion reported annual net returns above 29 percent every year between 2010 and 2018, the fund’s assets under management stayed at about $10 billion throughout that period. This suggests to me that whatever opportunities they're exploiting, they would vanish quickly if they would increase the fund's size (e.g. by compounding returns). It's worth taking a look at the Numberphile interview with Simons ( this video ). There he suggests that they're mostly using ML and other relatively simple techniques, with a bit of more advanced math when it comes to predicting how a trade will move the market. This chimes in well with the idea that they have to keep their trades relatively small in order to remain this profitable.

Collected takeaways from “The Man Who Solved the Market” - a (good) book about Jim Simons and RenTec that ring plausible to me at link . A good Simons interview (by Numberphile) is this video .

Numberphile have done a pretty good interview with him which is worth a watch. There is both a full length 1 hour interview [0] and a cut down interview running 18 minutes [1]. [0]: this video [1]: link

More of a Musk fan myself. Since you mentioned him, Jim Simons has a really good interview too and it was pretty cool to hear his story [1]. Worth a watch if you haven't seen it and are into RenTec. [1] this video

It's because James Simons is a serious and actually intelligent person with depth of knowledge, and thus, he is one that doesn't need to opine on random things. He also makes a lot of money in a very secretive way. I'm not sure why anyone expects him to expound in detail on how Renaissance Technologies does it. Simons also spends more money than some governments on very serious and advanced scientific research. I suppose he's rather busy with all his investments and philanthropy. Musk is busy selling himself and filling his unfillable ego. You can see in Simons' TED interview with Chris Anderson how he gets rather annoyed with Chris at times, particularly when Chris mentions Simons' "amazing mind" at around 8:30. Simons seems, to me, to be a rather pragmatic and humble person who doesn't particularly enjoy flattery. Chris even throws out a quote by Musk at the very end of the interview, fishing for some similar platitude from Simons, but Simons deftly avoids giving out such an empty quote. link Most interestingly, you can tell Simons' like of science and mathematics and alludes to his interest when he mentions his investment into the origins of life towards the end. There are two interesting talks or interviews I know of with Simons: * Full-length Numberphile interview: this video * His lecture on his life given at MIT: link Simons actually attributes a lot of his success to luck.

You can troll through the job postings of most of these companies and learn about their org structures and tech stacks. When I looked almost nothing is public other than older documentaries. Nanex had some neat wiring diagrams and a few videos clips if you google them. Don't get too excited you're not going to learn about some super secret strategy or anything. This book was good link in that is sort of explains at a high level how you'd build a company to look at something like this (think it was one of the last chapters). You'll need extremely deep/skilled hardware/networking groups, data acquisitions (think packet capture to data) folks, people to clean and maintenance massive the data repos, internal tool teams, quantitative analysts, traders, management/admin, etc. At this level just getting the fiber to each exchange likely costs many many millions. When you go and look through those job postings you can sort of slot these into your mental model of this flow and start to see how it might be put together. That book is good but if you are new to the topic it will be almost unreadable. At least it was for me. I had to read it 3-4 times over the years and still find new things as my knowledge grows. I don't know if rentec is a HFT firm or what strategies they use but this was a really good interview with one of the founders this video .