221–230 of 261 posts
Someone's going to say this eventually, so it may as well be me. Rentech is not the only hyper successful fund. There are others, like TGS management ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/05/09/mys... ) that are just as successful and who you've never heard of. What rentech has done is to have built an excellent data processing engine that automatically extracts signal from noise. Other, much more secr…
Here's some inside baseball: I recently graduated from Stony Brook University where Jim Simons chaired the math department in the 1960s. He left to start Renaissance Technologies which is located 1 mile down the street from campus. Their influence is everywhere. We have a Simons Center for Geometry and Physics ($150m building). I take classes in Frey Hall (Robert Frey used be managing director at Rentec). Our med sch…
While I understand there are moral and ethical complications with the vast sums of wealth and influence attached to RenTec, the tone in these comments is disappointing... There is no fraud at RenTec, and there is nothing magical about what they do. It's simply an amazing technical and scientific organization, operating with almost unthinkable efficiency and scale. I haven't read the book, but I'm pretty sure this isn…
This is really interesting, and what I'm about to say makes me feel more bleeding-heart than I feel I am most days, but there's something deeply melancholy about the fact that this collection of the best intelligence our species has to offer, working together to achieve something utterly unheard of - so unheard of that many other smart people think there's something criminal going on - is exerting its collective effo…
As has been mentioned elsewhere, these are some of the best and brightest people from their fields who have established reputations and are well-known in their fields. I would assume most of these people have spent the bulk of their professional lives working in academia or in pure research, so I do wonder how many of the RenTech employees are people have been working for (relative) peanuts in academia before making the switch towards the end of their careers and "cashing out" essentially. Pretty sweet if you ask me.
It blows my mind how much RenTech does with some ~300 employees. I recently had a phone screen with them (no offer otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this) and all of my communication was with this MIT math PhD. No HR, just the PhD. Compare them with a Big N that has 10,000s of SWE’s. It’s a safe assumption that each engineer is individually less talented but even so, how do they iterate/experiment with such few employe…
He and his firm did more than anyone I know to make the world a more unstable place.
The tone of many comments here is disappointing. I'm really surprised at the number of people suggesting illegal activity. Why is it so hard to accept that someone did the math?
Mundane explanations, like (legal) information access advantage or superior model execution times, give fleeting advantages that are extremely unlikely to be unreproducible by others for very long, much less years or decades.
I’m not a bot but I am always posting relevant and recent (2017) New Yorker articles that are worth reading: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons-the... And this interesting theme: > Foundations are not taxed, so much of the money that supports them is money that otherwise would have gone to the government. Scientific mega-donors answer to no one but themselves. Private institutes tend to have boa…
I'm not a bot either, and why would you start your post by saying you're not a bot?
A great book about RenTec and Jim Simons came out recently: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution. Everyone in the industry worships Simons and RenTec as practically god-like. What they've managed to do shouldn't really be possible and is out of this world. According to Wikipedia over a 20 year period between 1994 and 2014, RenTec realized an 71.9% annualized return in their inte…
Highly unlikely things happen all the time. Their occurrence should not be ascribed to alpha due to occurrence. The probability of occurrence due to occurrence is of course 1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies like AHL and Winton have completely different goals and ways of making money... they got into the “quant” (a.k.a. trend following) industry very early and still reap the benefits, they have big AUMs, scalable strategies, etc, but (AFAIK) their actual performance isn’t that amazing (compared to RenTech, Two Sigma, Citadel, ...). I only interviewed at AHL so I cannot speak of the quality/intelligence of peopl…
Winton is fundamentally dissimilar to AHL. Winton have a reputation for skill and outperformance. AHL have a reputation for blundering incompetence (that is why the 'H' in AHL left to start Winton, and became a billionaire doing so). The only goal is to make money. I understand your point in that AHL are dissimilar to RenTech but I didn't say any way was correct. The right way is whatever makes money. You have firms…
Regarding analyst/graduate rotations, what do you think is the actual value there? To me it seems just a way for the team to lose a potentially decent employee just as they’re done training him/her. If the idea is to familiarize juniors with the firm, what it does and how it works, wouldn’t a shorter program with direct lessons work better (e.g. what some investment banks do - send everyone to the HQ for a few weeks - or Jane Street, where everyone first learns OCaml)?