Jim Simons is my hero

This is long, but worth the read! I just quoted the first part below. The whole thing can be found here.

Simons at Renaissance Cracks Code, Doubling Hedge Fund Assets 2007-11-27 00:13 (New York)


By Richard Teitelbaum
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- On a hot afternoon in September, Renaissance Technologies LLC founder Jim Simons is too busy to take a phone call. It is, he says, from Cumrun Vafa, a preeminent Harvard University professor and expert on string theory, which describes the building blocks of the universe as extended one-dimensional filaments.

``Get another time when I can talk to him,'' Simons tells his assistant.

Then he mentions that the next day, he'll be meeting with Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to discuss autism research. And he's slated that Saturday to host a gala honoring Math for America, or MFA, a four-year-old nonprofit he started that provides stipends to New York City math teachers.

``I'm undoubtedly involved in too many things at the same time,'' Simons says in his 35th-floor office in midtown Manhattan. ``But you make your life interesting.''

String theory, autism, math education: It's fair to ask how Simons, 69, manages his day job overseeing the world's biggest hedge fund firm. The answer, judging from the numbers, is very well.

Renaissance is on fire: Its Medallion Fund -- which uses computers and trading algorithms to invest in world markets -- returned more than 50 percent in the first three quarters of 2007. It had about $6 billion in assets as of July 1.

Simons registered that performance as subprime and related markets were collapsing, sending two mortgage-related hedge funds run by Bear Stearns Cos. into bankruptcy. The turmoil pummeled the Goldman Sachs Global Alpha Fund, a rival to Renaissance's funds, which fell more than 25 percent during the same time. Morgan Stanley's computer jockeys lost $390 million in a single day in early August.

Life Story

Medallion's returns are no anomaly. The fund, which trades everything from soybean futures to French government bonds in rapid fire, hasn't had a negative quarter since early 1999. From the end of 1989 through 2006, it returned 38.5 percent annualized, net of fees.

More surprising than those returns is Simons's life story. At an age when hedge fund pioneers such as Michael Steinhardt have long since stopped managing other people's money, Simons is building on Medallion's success. He's adding funds and strategies and accumulating assets, which totaled $35.4 billion as of Sept. 28.

In August 2005, Simons started Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund, or RIEF, which invests in U.S. stocks. Through Sept. 30, it has returned 12.8 percent annualized. Unlike Medallion, which turns over its holdings dozens of times each year, RIEF keeps its positions for months or longer. Simons said at the time of the fund's inception RIEF could theoretically manage as much as $100 billion.

'New Possibilities'

In December 2006, he limited new investments in the fund to $1.5 billion a month. As of Sept. 30, 2007, it had $25.6 billion in assets.

In October, Simons started Renaissance Institutional Futures Fund, or RIFF, to invest in commodities. It's up 5.2 percent for the month. He says Renaissance's research shows the new fund can manage as much as $50 billion. Along with RIEF, it will promote cross-fertilization of ideas inside Renaissance, Simons says.

``Challenge is good,'' he says. ``It opens one's eyes to new possibilities.''

When not in Manhattan, Simons runs his empire from a 15-foot (4.6-meter) by 20-foot office in Renaissance's gated and guarded campus off Route 25A in East Setauket on New York's Long Island, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of the Empire State Building. With most of the trading automated, there's little of the hurly-burly of a typical hedge fund firm.

Doubling Assets

Along with routine personnel and marketing tasks, Simons makes time for the researchers and programmers who stop by his office to discuss mathematical and statistical issues they've encountered as they work on new trading strategies.

More than 200 employees, of whom about a third have Ph.D.s, work in East Setauket. Another 100 are based in Manhattan, San Francisco, London and Milan. ``He creates an environment where it's easy to be creative and works hard to keep the bullshit level to a minimum,'' says former managing director Robert Frey, who worked at Renaissance from 1992 to 2004.

Even without the new commodities fund, Renaissance's assets have more than doubled in a year from about $16 billion on Sept. 30, 2006. That growth has catapulted Renaissance past such titans as Daniel Och's Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC, Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates Inc. and David Shaw's D.E. Shaw & Co. to become the world's largest hedge fund manager, according to data compiled by Hedge Fund Research Inc. and Bloomberg.

Code Cracker

Medallion's 3.9 percent return during August, though that fund too was whipsawed by volatility, bolstered Simons's reputation as the silver-bearded wizard of quantitative investing.

In quant funds, mathematicians and computer scientists mine enormous amounts of data from financial markets looking for correlations among stocks, bonds, derivatives and other instruments. They search for predictive signals that will foretell whether, say, a palladium futures contract is likely to rise or fall.

``There are just a few individuals who have truly changed how we view the markets,'' says Theodore Aronson, principal of Aronson + Johnson + Ortiz LP, a quantitative money management firm in Philadelphia with $29.3 billion in assets. ``John Maynard Keynes is one of the few. Warren Buffett is one of the few. So is Jim Simons.''

Aronson credits Renaissance with validating the entire field of quantitative investing and proving that the freedom accorded to hedge fund managers to short stocks, borrow money and invest in myriad instruments can produce results that far outstrip typical market returns.

`Role Model'

Simons, standing just under 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing 185 pounds (84 kilograms), has trod an unlikely path. A former code cracker for the U.S. National Security Agency, in 1968 he became chairman of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University, part of the New York state university system. He built the department into what David Eisenbud, former director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, calls one of the world's top centers for geometry.

In 1977, frustrated with a math problem and eager for change, he abandoned academia to start what would become Renaissance, hiring professors, code breakers and statistically minded scientists and engineers who'd worked in astrophysics, language recognition theory and computer programming.

``All the quants in the world are trying to follow in Jim's footsteps because what he's built at Renaissance is truly extraordinary,'' says Andrew Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Financial Engineering and chief scientific officer of quant hedge fund firm AlphaSimplex Group LLC. ``I and many others look up to him as a tremendous role model.'' ...