Anyone got a link to the rentec money machine source code? I fancy an early retirement. Jokes aside, really sad to hear this. The guy did a lot of good with the money from what I understand
It is not just one source. probably constant revision
Jim Simons has died
201–210 of 338 posts
Re: Jim Simons has died
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't really hire finance people so I suspect most/all of the interview processes are heavy on the match/stat side.
Quantitative finance interviews are pretty much all probability and stats questions.
Yeah there's a famous but outdated book called A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews by Xinfeng Zhou that gives you some idea of what questions they like to ask.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#203The reality is that most extremely wealthy people are very far on the right tail of intelligence. People exist that can predict the market, they are just very rare.
I’m doubting. Simons might be an exception given that he got a PhD in maths at age 23. He was always smart, and I think he was bound to excel in whatever field he chose. But people don’t need be extremely smart to get wealthy. Just executing well on a simple idea can make one extremely wealthy, and there’s considerable luck involved. There’s also the need to have persuasive skills, connections, charisma, and all that…
It's like a snowball effect. If something does not 'take' no amount of IQ or connections will help.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#204Earlier 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.
sadly, the trend for these sorts of things is to sour after the original founder leaves... There is an esoteric concept that has some dynamics that explain this phenomenon somewhat. Not to get to into the weeds (the origins of this concept are esoteric religious ideas - I mean this secularly, as it relates to business entities) but the concept is an 'egregore' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore#:~:text=An%20egreg…
This split exists not just in organizations but in society at large. Some people are builders and some are redistributors. Builders take pride in creating value and redistributors can provide useful service by making value available to more people. Very often engineers are not interested in marketing/selling their product and redistributors fill a useful niche.
However, some fraction of redistributors are willing to enrich themselves at the expense of others. These should never be allowed to make decisions affecting others. A founder should always look for people from the first group by looking at their past behavior and make sure those succeed him.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#205I 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.
dumb comment. he did more than that. consider his catching pennies helped others who chose other vocations.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#206Sometimes people act like guys like Bill Gates or Elon Musk are coming from deep personal scientific knowledge and accomplishment, but they're absolutely nothing compared to Simons. His contributions to geometry in the 60s and 70s, from minimal surfaces to Berger's classification of special holonomy to Chern-Simons theory, were fundamental and are still well-remembered. His name would be known even if he'd never gone…
Bill gates did math 55. legit smart guy
Re: Jim Simons has died
#207What 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…
> Then he empirically disproved the strong-form EMH Not clear as we do not really know exactly how RenTech works. It is believed that there are substantial tax loopholes that were taken advantage of - which would go a long way (not all the way) to explaining the incredible performance of his fund.
Every serious finance company knows how to optimize taxes.
Simons was returning 25-50% on 8BN AUM at Medallion every year with one or two exceptions every year for 30 years.
Even the hedge funds we let openly operate with black edge in plain sight can rarely do that for 3-5 years.
It’s obviously debatable unless they open the books, but it’s pretty much common knowledge which funds are bending the rules (flagrantly violating securities law), and I’m unaware that Medallion was anything other than just there first.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#208I highly recommend the book "The Man Who Solved the Market" by Gregory Zuckerman which explains how Simons build his infamous company. https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...
infamous implies bad.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#209Sadly 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…
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 read you do not apply, rather you get recruited.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't there some shenanigans with those numbers around their larger funds not doing as well? It's easy to make a few high margin dollars, hard to make a lot of high margin dollars.
depends on your definition of "few". Rentech made a "few" for very large "few".
lol . Only made tens of billion. What a failure.