The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

"Jim Simons is the hedge fund manager who created one of the biggest and most successful quant funds, Renaissance Technologies. The book is written by a journalist from the Wall Street Journal , Gregory Zuckerman. Again, this book gets my admiration as a journalist, because he succeeds in opening up an industry, a company and a person that are notoriously private. Simons’s own story is pretty extraordinary. He was a gifted mathematician and a codebreaker. His talent appears to have been in finding people from a range of places outside the finance industry—mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists—who would contribute as a team to building these algorithms and codes that would allow them to crack open the global markets and make a vast amount of money. Within fund management, there’s the active stock picking and analyzing of stocks done by human beings. The quantitative revolution was about hedge funds putting computers to work, spotting the patterns, creating the models, analyzing the data automatically and making the fund money. “It’s quite a rich prize. Each of the finalists gets £10,000 just for being on the shortlist ” It’s an area that’s controversial because sometimes all quant funds suddenly end up doing the same thing and you end up triggering automatic crashes. There are problems and volatility. But it’s also been revolutionary in producing results that make money for people at a lower cost, probably, than having a lot of human fund managers doing the same job. Yes, I don’t have a figure in front of me, but we don’t need to know the precise dollars and cents: he’s a billionaire. He’s also established a reputation as a genuinely high intellect investor. He’s not somebody who’s simply taken risks and run with them. He’s somebody who’s actually done the science behind this, which makes him more interesting. Zuckerman has been diligent in tracking him down, to the admiration certainly of colleagues of mine who have read the book. They’re amazed by the amount of access and inside intelligence he’s managed to accumulate. Indeed. I read a book—that isn’t on the list—earlier this year, about people starting their careers late in life. He’s one example of that."