author : Gregory Zuckerman

No other investor – Warren Buffett, George Soros or Ray Dalio – can touch the track record of Renaissance Technologies founder Jim Simons. Since 1988, Renaissance’s Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 per cent and the firm has received trading gains of more than one hundred billion dollars.

A world-class mathematician and former codebreaker, Simons had a hunch that financial markets moved in orderly ways – just not in ways that could be detected with human intuition and insight. Working from a ramshackle office in Long Island, Simons hired mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists to develop algorithms to hunt for hidden patterns in the markets. After decades of struggle, his data-driven approach paid off. No longer a kooky strategy, other investors began to emulate Simons’s quantitative methods, inspiring a revolution that has swept Wall Street, Silicon Valley and everywhere eke predictions are made.

But this is also the story of how Wall Street billionaires changed society. As Renaissance’s executives became billionaires, Simons donated vast sums to Hilary Clinton’s campaign while also impacting science and education. His co-CEO Robert Mercer funded Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential running, placing Steve Bannon and others at the heart at the campaign. Mercer also backed alt-right publication Breitbart and played a key role in the success of Britain’s Brexit campaign.

In this gripping tale, Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman reveals how Simons commend the market and launched a quantitative revolution – with consequences for us all.