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Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

institutionalinvestor.com

81–90 of 195 posts

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#81

As the article hints at, Medallion isn't really an investment fund so much as a pool of capital which is employed in the business of providing tactical liquidity to markets. This is a business where one's competitive advantage rests upon their technological advantage, and Renaissance has been exceptionally adept at building and maintaining that advantage. The EMH is a theoretical concept that must be tempered to acco…

The article and Mercer's explanation basically explains Virtu's approach, and therefore makes sense wrt known performance vs. methodology from a more public company (Virtu)

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Renaissance is simply better than anyone in the world at finding the markets where traders are willing to pay the highest premiums for liquidity, and providing it in a timely and measured dose that ensures they skim the cream off the profit opportunity. Why are they better? This still requires the same kind of explanation as 'they are simply better at investing than anyone in the world'

>Why are they better? Possible explanation: there aren't any other firms founded by as great mathematicians as the founders of Renaissance. I saw a quote online attributed to them, something like: "We hire the A-grade mathematicians. Most other firms hire B and C grade mathematicians, and don't even know the A grade exists". This fits my experience, as a D-grade mathematician working in finance. Never heard of signif…

Haha this was basically LTCM's publicly stated approach, to be fair.

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#83

My long standing hypothesis on Medallion is that they figured out how to apply gauge theoretic techniques to financial markets. This fits with Simons work that he did before he founded the fund. The fact that gauge theory is applicable to for example currency trading is folk knowledge in the Havard, Princeton, IAS circles (here is for example the lecture notes of a popular lecture by Maldacena that uses currency trad…

My theory is that they use Hidden Markov Models to figure out something subtle about the market -- probably regimes.

I got this impressions from several of Simons interviews, and then the recent book has added more clues.

Note that the Baum-Welch algo is one of the leading algos used to solve the underlying model and Baum worked at Rentech.

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#84
post #60

>Robert Mercer, the former co–chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, allegedly told a friend that Medallion was right 50.75 percent of the time when it came to its millions of trades — adding that “you can make billions that way.” Totally not a finance guy, but how can this be true with drawdowns? The losses are worse than the gains- if you had $100 and take a 33% loss, it would take a bit more than a 50% gain…

Virtu financial does this approach, very successful. Its SEC forms explain things better.

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#85
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those useless academics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...

any successful academic in economics making money in the stock market? Or I am missing something? Maybe a Nobel winner from Chicago?

No, for the same reasons the soldier pressing the button at a nuclear test doesn't get the Nobel Prize for doing so.

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#86
post #66
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they could keep it up for that long without slipping up at least once. Enron started around the same time and got tripped up in 2001. If it were a one man investment shop, then maybe it leans more towards fraud. But if they obviously employ dozens of quants, and have obvious hardware outlays, it seems less likely. It makes a lot of sense to me that they just win a bit more than they lose, play a lot of…

Enron only collapsed because they intentionally destabilized major public-facing national security infrastructure (retail energy markets), and they were incredibly brazen and sloppy about it. If they didn't make as large bets on collateral damage, and they acted with professionalism, they would have been fine.

See what you said? They made too many large, overleveraged bets.

Blew them up

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#87

As the article hints at, Medallion isn't really an investment fund so much as a pool of capital which is employed in the business of providing tactical liquidity to markets. This is a business where one's competitive advantage rests upon their technological advantage, and Renaissance has been exceptionally adept at building and maintaining that advantage. The EMH is a theoretical concept that must be tempered to acco…

I'm not sure how accurate this tactical liquidity picture is, at least for much of medallion's history. For a good portion of their existence they called in all their trades twice a day. Them being fairly late to the automated trading game was one of the the surprises from the book for me. Any "HFT" as mentioned in the article is not done by renaissance, but through execution services. The big picture seems to be sta…

Providing liquidity doesn't necessarily mean HFT. It doesn't even necessarily mean classical market making.

Here's how I like to think about liquidity. It's the market's ability to absorb random imbalances in the non-informed order flow (while still correctly engaging in price discovery for informed order flow). In other words it looks a lot like what economists call price elasticity. Having a lot of participants who are very price sensitive makes prices stable by keeping demand responsive to small fluctuations.

On the very short horizon that's done by market makers and HFT participants. They're quoting a tight two-sided market so that as orders arrive the price remains stable. But HFTs keep very small inventories[1]. They're unable to absorb the typical imbalance seen on the scale of hours, or even minutes.

There exists a secondary class of participants, usually grouped under the catchall category of "stat-arb", that exist to fill this need. They're still trading directionally, but that direction is very sensitive to recent price moves on the scale of hours or even minutes. Moreover they tend to overwhelmingly trade in a mean-reverting manner.[2] Effectively these participants "provide liquidity" in the sense that they're stepping in and absorbing imbalances in the natural order flow.

[1]https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/idc/groups/public/@... [2]https://web.mit.edu/Alo/www/Papers/august07.pdf

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#88
post #60

>Robert Mercer, the former co–chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, allegedly told a friend that Medallion was right 50.75 percent of the time when it came to its millions of trades — adding that “you can make billions that way.” Totally not a finance guy, but how can this be true with drawdowns? The losses are worse than the gains- if you had $100 and take a 33% loss, it would take a bit more than a 50% gain…

No, you bet 100 x $1, win 50.75% of the time, so you make $1.5 in profit. Now repeat 1bn times.

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#89

Investing is like tech, its winner take all. This is like being surprised that Google dominates search

Saying tech is winner take all, and investing is like that, seems wrong.

I like the Google search comparison though - a few academics found a novel approach, then hired only the best and brightest and used technological advantage to grow. The comparison is quite apt actually.

Re: Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

#90
post #5

Seems to me there's an obvious flaw in the efficient market hypothesis. It states that, essentially, you can find no sustainable edge because the market rapidly reacts to information. Meaning, if there is some information relevant to expected investment performance, investors will immediately act on it, extinguishing the information advantage. But what if the opportunity is some kind of abstract pattern that doesn't…

The efficient market hypothesis is a lot like Newtonian gravity. It's not a perfect theory, but it's a pretty close approximation that pretty much covers most any domain outside very exotic conditions.

If somebody comes up to you, a random Joe Schmoe, and tells you they have an investment that consistently beats the market on a risk-adjusted basis. Well... You can pretty much guarantee that they're full of shit.

Even just analyzing papers that passed the rigor of academic peer review, the sizable majority of market anomalies fail to replicate on an out-of-sample basis[1].

Like Newtonian gravity, to the extent that deviations exist it's either of very small magnitude or in very exotic conditions. The market anomalies that do exist, like the HML value effect or momentum effect, don't substantially improve the optimal portfolio and go through very long periods of deep drawdowns.

Or in the realm of the very exotic, there are small teams, in aggregate making up much less than 0.1% of the market, that do consistently out-perform. There common characteristics of these strategies are that they have tightly limited capacity, involve a huge up-front investment in technology and expertise, almost never offer to manage outsider money, and are extremely hard to replicate even by other experts.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23394

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