Quant King Jim Simons passes away at 86

investmentnews.com:

Jim Simons, the mathematician-investor who created what many in finance consider the world’s greatest moneymaking machine at his secretive firm, Renaissance Technologies, has died. He was 86.

He died today in New York City, according to his charitable foundation, which didn’t cite a cause. 

In turning from academia to investing as he entered his 40s, Simons eschewed standard practices of money managers in favor of quantitative analysis — finding patterns in data that predicted price changes. His technique was so successful that he became known as the Quant King.

At Renaissance, located about 60 miles east of Manhattan in quiet East Setauket, New York, Simons avoided employing Wall Street veterans. Instead he sought out mathematicians and scientists, including astrophysicists and code breakers, who could ferret out usable investment information in the terabytes of data his firm sucked in each day on everything from sunspots to overseas weather.

Over more than three decades, his returns consistently trounced markets even as computer power got cheaper and competitors tried their best to mimic Renaissance’s success by building their own complex algorithms to run their funds.

“There are just a few individuals who have truly changed how we view the markets,” Theodore Aronson, founder of AJO Vista, a quantitative money management firm, told Bloomberg Markets magazine in 2008. “John Maynard Keynes is one of the few. Warren Buffett is one of the few. So is Jim Simons.”

A onetime code breaker for the US government, Simons refused to give specifics about how he produced more than four times the return of the S&P 500 Index in his most famous fund, Medallion. From 1988 through 2023, the fund generated an astounding average annual