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THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW A SECRETIVE MATHEMATICIAN PIONEERED ALGORITHMIC TRADING AND BECAME THE GREATEST MONEYMAKER OF ALL TIME
NO OTHER INVESTOR-Warren Buffett, George Soros, Peter Lynch, Steve Cohen, or Ray Dalio-can touch the record of Renaissance Technologies founder Jim Simons. Since 1988, Renaissance's signature Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent. The firm has earned profits of more than one hundred billion dollars; Simons is worth twenty-three billion dollars.
A world-class mathematician and former code breaker, Simons had a crazy hunch: that financial markets move in orderly ways-just not in ways that can be detected with human intuition and insight. Simons pioneered a data-driven, algo- rithmic approach that inspired a quantitative revolution that has swept the world.
As Renaissance became a market force, its executives began influencing the world beyond finance. Simons became a major figure in scientific research, educa- tion, and liberal politics. Senior executive Robert Mercer is more responsible than anyone else for the Trump presidency. He placed Steve Bannon in the campaign and funded Trump's victorious 2016 effort. Mercer also impacted the campaign behind Brexit.
Drawing on unprecedented access to Simons and dozens of current and former Renaissance employees, Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman tells the gripping story of how an unlikely revolutionary conquered financial markets but failed to anticipate how his success would impact his firm and his country. It's a portrait of a modern-day Midas who remade markets in his own image, and a story of what that means for the rest of us.
