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Simons's Medallion Fund up 80% in 2008

Here's some unabashed praise.

For thousands of years, people have wanted to make money. Newton even tried investing after coming up with his laws of physics, and even tried alchemy--and failed. He said he could calculate the motion of the stars, but not the madness of men.

Simons has more or less--and continues to--do practically that. He is a modern day alchemist of the highest order, and with his hedge fund of 300 people, he does what most of the business majors on Wall Street can only dream of.

In short, he's gone beyond quant. He's what I officially dub: a mathemagician.

Simons is now using his wealth to go on a one-man crusade to revolutionize math across America and instead of having our k-12s go into the saturated and parasitic fields of law and accounting and business, they'll go into engineering to build newer power plants, and combine technology with agriculture, energy generation, and go towards utopia. And of course, we'll have better math and science teachers.

That's what being stupidly wealthy is about. It's about the merit you create with your brain, such as Brin, Gates, and Simons have done, and furthermore, about how you use that influence to change the world for the better.

So here's to hoping Simons continues to kill it, and continues to run RenTec. He's a massive inspiration, a man on top of the mountain, and a tremendous asset to America as a whole through his philanthropy and nonprofit organizations.

It's just too bad that he's 70 and chain smokes. I wish he were 40, so he'd have 50 more years to live and revolutionize the country.

Edit: funny...bloomberg calls him the Silver Bearded Wizard (of quantitative investing) and with his good intentions and the capital behind it, he may very well be almost a real-life Gandalf in that he brings good when it is needed most. (Yes, I really liked the LotR movies.)

Edit 2: I just wish he would open up RIEF as an ETF, invested in by a clearinghouse, but then said house would allow people to buy shares of this ETF at a price of $20 or so, just so that we broke undergrads would be able to bet with the greatest quantitative mind in the financial world, and it'd probably fill up RIEF's remaining 75 bil capacity pretty quickly as well.

Come on, Dr. Simons! Open it up to us kids!
 
Medallion Fund has had an average annual return of 38% after fees since 1989.

If this guy is not Madoff he is genius.
 
See this is the thing about quants: they don't need to scam anyone because to them, finance isn't about the big money. Money is simply a metric used to objectively rate their intelligence.

Simons won the highest prize in all of geometry and was the chairman of an entire university's math department. Why would he need to scam anyone? Did he need the extra cash? I'd say most probably not.

He said that he got frustrated with a math problem and went into finance more or less for the fun of it. And so, he made a killing just because he could.

I wonder though...is it stupid to aspire to meet his standard one day, and to be as good as him? I remember Emanuel Derman said that his aspirations decayed. At 17, he wanted to be the next Einstein. At 21, the next Feynman, then the next TD Lee then he simply envied the postdoc next door.

Interestingly enough, I think we can safely say that Derman surpassed all of those in that list aside from perhaps Einstein and Feynman (and you can argue either side of those as well).

Is it silly to aspire to be the next Simons?
 
IlyaKEightSix said:
See this is the thing about quants: they don't need to scam anyone because to them, finance isn't about the big money. Money is simply a metric used to objectively rate their intelligence.
Click to expand...

I take it you speak from firsthand experience?
 
For the record: the whole God thing is me deliberately not taking myself seriously and making a parody out of some of the praise and descriptions I've seen on the internet.

As for Simons and his army of numerati...he told Stony Brook to run away in 2004.

It's the silly Stony Brook people that didn't listen to him. Why? I have no clue whatsoever.

That said, I'm not sure why bloomberg likes to continue to beat on this Stony Brook/Madoff indirect connection. Fine, the world's finest quants got an egg on their face. It happens. What's the big deal? They're all human...at least to varying degrees.
 
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/sto...x?guid={374B1243-C237-466A-A17F-DAC5777FA5D1}

160% on Medallion's 8 billion, and Medallion is capped at 8 billion.

2.5 billion in one year.

I am not worthy. I am not worthy!

Yet.

Also note David E. Shaw's 275 million RESIDUAL income. He's now the head scientist of DESRes, his own personal biocomputational firm he started and funds with his hedge fund.

And yesterday, on fast money, Dylan Ratigan gave Jim Simons a cameo "POP" on the pops and drops.

But yeah...that's just jaw-dropping.
 
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