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Jim Simons has died

simonsfoundation.org

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Re: Jim Simons has died

#181

Post by stanford_labrat »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #50
instagib wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it’s a scam or not, I’ve seen a couple .onion sites for trading insider knowledge. You have to tell something to get in. Beating the S&P 500 is difficult and there are now zero fee funds to mimic it.

Big funds usually dont try to beat the market, they try to dampen volaility while tracking the S&P 500

even small funds, this was the investment thesis at the hedgefund that my dad worked for circa 2006-2008. they promised super dampened volatility but, as you might guess, they went belly up during the great recession.

The cause? Someone, somewhere in their financial product chain was not being faithful about the volatility of the asset they were basing their whole model on so when the market went tits up they did to.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#182

Post by spr-alex »

markgall wrote: post #13

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…

this was posted down into the comments already but geometry has nothing to do with https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/business/renaissance-irs-...

the simons foundation will have influence on machine learning and medicine for many decades to come though and will hopefully be a force of positivity in these fields

Re: Jim Simons has died

#183

Post by iamgopal »

tdullien wrote: post #142
1024core wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC his fund averaged around 30% gains per year, every year, over 30 years. (I'm going from memory here, too lazy to look it up). That is just such an unbelievable performance number.

Important to keep in mind that these returns ceased to be compounding quickly: they restarted from scratch 10bn each year to score 30%. Successful quant stratégies tend to hit capacity limits...

Their success is limited by what other party ready to lose, most of the time, these all are zero sum games.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#184

Post by kwere »

buggythebug wrote: post #157
tombert wrote: post #10

Sadly I've never been able to snag an interview with RenTech (and I've applied like a dozen times), but they're the ones that actually made me start taking finance a lot more seriously. Maybe if I ever finish my PhD they'll hire me. I had previously thought of HFT and Quant as a bunch of "finance bros", and kind of dismissed it as "not real CS" [1]. Reading about RenTech and Jim Simons made realize that there's actua…

Why would you think it was a bunch of "finance bros"? You can BS your way to the top in such things as Sales because raw intellect and mental ability is not required. The same can be said for many aspects of finance. But you can't just do HFT or Quant because you want to - you actually need skills. Same way I can't BS my way into designing a rocket - you either can or you can't.

Being able to BS yourself upward is a skill in itself. Management becomes "political" up the ladder

Re: Jim Simons has died

#185

Post by rybosworld »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #176
rybosworld wrote: post #80

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.)

I think the efforts do make the markets more efficient, and it would be hard to argue the opposite.

I'm just wondering out loud if that's a meaningful use of such a large percentage of top talent. I'm not faulting anyone who chooses to go that way. There's a lot of money to be made. To me, it seems unfortunate that we don't better incentive pursuit of science/engineering.

This paper breaks down how many people from top schools (MIT, Yale, Harvard) get jobs in finance. It's between 20-30% of the graduating class every year.

https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%2520Files/16-067_3d306ef...

Re: Jim Simons has died

#186

Post by therobots927 »

tombert wrote: post #58
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RT must be one of the most selective companies in the world. Even to get an interview you'd better have a damn good CV (medals in math/cs/science Olympiads, degree from a top tier school etc.). And then after a few years of working there you're a (multi)millionaire. It's totally bonkers.

I don't really blame them for not picking me, clearly whatever they've been doing has been working. I'm not entitled to a job from them, obviously. I don't really know what a "top tier" university is, but I can say for sure that my undergrad (WGU) wouldn't count as that. The PhD I'm in is from a more prestigious university [1], and I guess FAANG experience isn't enough to snag an interview with them. [1] University o…

I've heard stories of professors getting letters in the mail from RenTech totally out of the blue. They pay so well that I'm surprised they even accept applications. Don't feel too bad about not passing their bar. What they've accomplished is essentially unheard of, and believed to be impossible by a lot of market theorists.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#187

Post by ljosifov »

agumonkey wrote: post #90
1024core wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC his fund averaged around 30% gains per year, every year, over 30 years. (I'm going from memory here, too lazy to look it up). That is just such an unbelievable performance number.

I'd still wish to have details on this (I too heard of similar numbers for his fund before), because in my newb eyes .. such returns would mean they could absorb a huge chunk of the planet liquidity.

You'd have to sacrifice the returns if you want bigger size. For every trade you do, there will be expected return (+ve) and then some costs to pay (-ve). Commissions and similar costs are only linear so not terrible. With increasing size, the market impact cost that's non-linear will soon overwhelm all other costs. So you keep adding alpha in your forecasts (via your research pipeline), that will be eaten away by the impact cost, as you scale up. If you keep it small (-ish - still gross pfolio will be billions) - then you will get to keep high returns.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#188

Post by quartesixte »

mycologos wrote: post #53
adversaryIdiot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if only more companies fostered the idea of employee wellbeing

A somewhat cynical take is that "smart people" is doing a lot of work here. If you get to restrict your hiring to people who have proven themselves to be world-class in something, they are probably much more likely to respond to freedom by pursuing something than by coasting (or worse).

Yeah an unpopular and maybe socially inconvenient thing to say at parties, but the more I manage operational teams, the more I find this true. Bureaucracy stoops down to the lowest common denominator of the group. Smart people capable of self-motivating and self-organizing don’t need a lot of bureaucratic structure if given enough incentive and freedom.

Being promised millions is a lot of incentive.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#189

Post by lupire »

spr-alex wrote: post #182
markgall wrote: post #13

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…

this was posted down into the comments already but geometry has nothing to do with https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/business/renaissance-irs-... the simons foundation will have influence on machine learning and medicine for many decades to come though and will hopefully be a force of positivity in these fields

Simons was a geometer.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1970273?origin=crossref

Re: Jim Simons has died

#190

Post by lupire »

renewiltord wrote: post #33
PaulHoule wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That money for the arXiv was a decade late. arXiv barely survived the 2000s.

Ah, good looking out. It was on my list for this year https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html but if it's useless I'll skip it. More for GiveWell it is.

Why would you change your donation plans based on an unsubstantiated snarky comment about an event 15 years ago?
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