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Jim Simons has died

simonsfoundation.org

171–180 of 338 posts

Re: Jim Simons has died

#171

Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels. (I found these conferences a bit ridiculous, but the luxury treatment did ensure that they could get together a lot of the biggest names in the field in one place.) Besides the conference…

> found these conferences a bit ridiculous

Was it the content/aims of the conferences, or just that they were so ostentatiously luxurious?

Re: Jim Simons has died

#173

What a loss. I hope I join the community in wishing the best for his loved ones. But also what a life. He could have quit 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago and been in the history books. What’s now called Chern-Simons is a monumental result in topology that IIRC dates to the mid-60s. Then he empirically disproved the strong-form EMH, a result in economics of which I’m unaware of any peer in its conclusiveness. Then he bui…

@dang I think this merits a black bar.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#174
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His whole RenTech story was fascinating. Effectively an outsider in finance who gathered a bunch of other outsiders (aka big mathematicians), and decided to start a hedge fund that takes zero interest in the actual companies and trades solely on math. Which makes sense, since none of the main people involved in its creation had any corporate or finance experience, but tons of math experience and knowledge. This is ov…

“The Man Who Solved The Market” is fascinating because it spans almost the entire history quantitative finance (through the lens of RenTech) dating back to the 1970s. Simmons was one of the first to realize the advantage of collecting and analyzing vast sums of data to identify patterns in financial markets. They were digitizing magnetic tapes and collecting more data than they could even process given technical limi…

I can second this book recommendation. Remarkable candor in such a secretive field.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#175
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully the Simons empire has enough people who will keep executing his vision and stave off bureaucratic rot. Making money is one thing, but circulating so much of it back through math and science is a great legacy.

The thing is that he genuinely loved math. I don't think there's really anyone in his orbit who loves math as much. His family is his family and his colleagues love money. We'll see in the coming months and years whether he was able to create a structure that continues his legacy but usually the answer to that question is no.

It's hard watching venerable institutions rot into "just avoid administerial short term blame" death loops. You have to have skin in the game, not just hire a temporary manager for it.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#176

I might be naive but it seems unfortunate that so many bright minds end up using their talents to catch trillions of pennies in the financial markets.

Your comment just made me wonder if the catching of those trillions of pennies makes the markets more efficient.

(Not an economist, and I don't pretend to know.)

Re: Jim Simons has died

#177
While I'm not one to fawn after billionaires, I found his life story and personality really fascinating. He really seemed to maintain a humble approach, and in the Numberphile interview, which is excellent, he really emphasized the notion of luck in success. He donated a ton of money in very targeted ways that have been extremely successful. I think because of his humble approach, lack of self-promotion, etc., he's a bit unknown outside certain circles, but his impact in certain areas has been big.

While I wish that our country didn't have to rely on billionaires spearheading initiatives, which often goes the wrong way, Simons was absolutely an example of one of the good ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0

Re: Jim Simons has died

#178
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because such returns aren't scalable. According to industry rumors, RenTech is somewhere between $10-20bn AUM (assets under management, i.e. the capital used for trading), and the profit that they make, they can't reinvest, they have to take it out as profit.

How come? Why do they have to take the profits out and can’t compound it? I know literally zero about this stuff!

The simplistic explanation is, if you're doing arbitrage - i.e. "fixing market mispricing", there's only so much arbitrage you can do before you fix the price...

This is of course a completely theoretical proposition, because in reality you don't know what the "fair price" is. You don't even have probabilities, because those are also unobservable, you only see one version of "history".

In practice, what happens is that if you trade "too much", "shit goes wrong". Both of these things require empirical estimation and are easy to get wrong.

The most obvious is the market liquidity, which you can observe at e.g. BitStamp TradeView [1] - there's only so many orders at a given price, so the more you trade, the worse price you get (the average/marginal trade).

No professional of course trades like that, especially not HFTs, but similar problems happen at every scale - you're competing with other traders, they might have better information, there's limited amount of stock in the market, the edge/alpha/expected profit you can earn decays over time as the price moves, if you trade too much you move the market and inform other participants who can then trade against you, ...

[1] https://www.bitstamp.net/market/tradeview/

Re: Jim Simons has died

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memorial service? What are you on about? In all likelihood, nobody here had met the guy, and HN would hardly even be on his radar. Picture yourself at a coffee place discussing some celebrity's life event and maybe it won't be so weird anymore.

As an anecdote of one, I knew him.

[flagged]

Re: Jim Simons has died

#180

Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels. (I found these conferences a bit ridiculous, but the luxury treatment did ensure that they could get together a lot of the biggest names in the field in one place.) Besides the conference…

Quanta Magazine is also funded by his foundation.

came here to mention this as well! fantastic ezine that i click everytime i see it linked here.
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