Jim Simons: The Greatest Investor of All-Time
Jim Simons passed away last week. He was a fascinating man, who not only had the strongest investing track record we’ve seen, but was a brilliant manager and leader. I spoke to Greg Zuckerman, the man who literally wrote the book about Simons and his hedge fund on the Wealthy Behavior podcast.
Here’s an updated recap and link to the entire conversation.
A secretive hedge fund you’ve likely never heard of has earned 66% A YEAR for its clients. It wasn’t done by superior stock picking. They never had a strong grasp on financial history. They use code, algorithms, and a quantitative investing approach honed over decades, which is explained in the book about Jim Simons and his team: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.
The Man Who Solved the Market
Available wherever you get your podcasts and through the above link
Our Discussion
Greg explains how Simons’s firm, Renaissance Technologies, succeeded through persistence, being run by the greatest manager long-time market watchers have ever seen, and an algorithm-based trading system and investment approach that has been refined over the years to extract returns from the market via short-term trades and 500,000 lines of code.
Simons was a brilliant geometer, government code breaker, and successful academic who built a world class university math department before pivoting to investments because he wanted to be rich and change the world.
One of his top lieutenants used his billions to influence politics, and along with his daughter installed Steve Bannon and Kelly Ann Conway into the Trump campaign when it was floundering in 2016. It changed history and damaged important relationships between long-time partners.
Be sure to listen to the end as Greg also explains:
- What makes Jim Simons a brilliant manager
- Lessons for individual investors on managing their own money even if they are not going to try quantitative investing
- The value of persistence and working your advantages to get where you want
- How he spotted the Madoff fraud and why he didn’t do more about it
- An overview of his other books, which are also must-reads