Connoisseur of quantity
James Harris Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, was a pioneer of quantitative investing (QI) across asset classes. While he was less famous than some of his peers like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, he was equally, if not more, successful in investing, outperforming markets with an amazing level of consistency.
The popular statistic floating around is that $1,000 in his signature Medallion Fund — known for its consistent gains and only accessible to Renaissance's owners and employees — in 1988 would be worth $42 mn today, compared to $40,000 if invested in S&P 500 and $1,52,000 in Berkshire Hathaway shares over the same period. Today, Renaissance manages $106 bn in assets. As estimated by Forbes, Simons' net worth equates to $31 bn.
Simons was a leading philanthropist who gave away billions during his lifetime to support medical and science research and teaching. His journey had been exciting and intriguing. A maths genius, he was only 23 when he received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Subsequently, aside from teaching at prestigious universities, he worked as a breaker of Soviet codes at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a position he held until he had divergent views on the Vietnam War.
However, it wasn't until his 40s that he took an interest in financial markets, more specifically in applying mathematical and statistical principles, thereby bringing to the fore a novel method of investing — QI, a process that relies on mathematical and statistical models to identify
