Transcript
Introduction
Jim Simons created the world's greatest money-making machine. To do so, Simons chose a different approach. A world-class mathematician and former code breaker, Simons had a hunch that financial markets moved in orderly ways, just not in ways that could be detected with human intuition and insight.
Simons believed that collecting and analyzing data could provide an advantage and that automated trading was possible. Working from a ramshackle office in a Long Island strip mall, Simons hired mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists to amass reams of historic records and develop algorithms to process it all.
His team hunted for patterns hidden deep in the numbers that might reveal long-sought rules governing markets. After decades of struggle, his data-driven approach paid off. Since 1988, Renaissance Signature Medallion Fund has generated average annual returns of 66%. They have made more than $100 billion and Simons is worth more than 23 billion.