Serving the Quantitative Finance Community

 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5180
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

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

January 11th, 2020, 2:32 am

In my limited experience, we take trade allocation very seriously and make them fully auditable, complete with time stamps. You really don't want even a hint of a suggestion that you may favor some accounts over others, even if it's all other people's money, since the success of some accounts may be more important to you than others. Really, this is a first order compliance concern.
 
User avatar
Alan
Posts: 2957
Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
Contact:

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

January 11th, 2020, 3:00 am

@tw,
What bearish said +
SEC and CFTC cases indicate scrutiny of trade allocations and 'cherry picking'

The SEC gets to see whatever they want, say on a regular inspection (infrequent, in my experience) or a surprise inspection prompted by a whistleblower tip or some other concern.  If you're a money manager, eventually they will park themselves in your conference room, and they will review the trade allocations. And, let's say 5 years later, they'll be back: Preparing for an On-Site SEC Audit (I got a chuckle out of #3, not something the firm I worked for ever did or even contemplated!)
 
User avatar
tw
Posts: 592
Joined: May 10th, 2002, 3:30 pm

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

January 19th, 2020, 10:36 am

@tw,
What bearish said +
SEC and CFTC cases indicate scrutiny of trade allocations and 'cherry picking'

The SEC gets to see whatever they want, say on a regular inspection (infrequent, in my experience) or a surprise inspection prompted by a whistleblower tip or some other concern.  If you're a money manager, eventually they will park themselves in your conference room, and they will review the trade allocations. And, let's say 5 years later, they'll be back: Preparing for an On-Site SEC Audit (I got a chuckle out of #3, not something the firm I worked for ever did or even contemplated!)
Interesting. And interesting it is always commodities where the crooks seem to be most blatant (before the post crash
reforms - REMIT etc- giving a large voice limit order to brokers was a true act of faith in my experience, the faith rarely being repaid!)

In my stint in a fund environment, the regulators and, more so, the auditors were pretty toothless but the investors were all over
any possible conflicts with some pretty blunt questioning. However that was all in very low frequency discretionary environments.
In the HFT world, who can say if some bit of code, deep down in 1000s of lines is saying where to book trades given economic performance.

Back to the book, it is a clearly a remarkable story. I find these books a bit frustrating that over-dramatise various bits (invariable around big losses 
or big gains) and under-describe other more interesting parts.  For instance, Simons' life was described at ~1 page per year till he got into
his 40s. That had all the detail about the big research results in geometry, decisions about working in pure research vs for the military
about running an ambitious growing maths department, and crucially the feelings around giving up academia to run a fund (having run a more mainstream
business in parallel). 
However the book has two gold mines of subject matter, one which it exploits and one which it doesn't.
The first is the contrast between Simons and Mercer, which given the current political situation I would thought would be front and centre.
Simons is clearly bold and confident and profoundly entrepreneurial. He comes across as deeply engaging and able to build up teams of 
motivated and loyal people. Exactly the sort of person you want to spend time with. It is fascinating that he handled all the investor contacts from the start and also was trying to cross invest in start ups from the 1980s. 
Mercer comes across as equally smart but the exact opposite. The kind of conversational skill that would put Dirac to shame whose 
chosen method of social interaction is to needle.and provoke - liking nothing more than to stay at home with a giant model
railway and a huge gun collection.

The other part (I guess stressed elsewhere) is to contrast how Renaissance looked from an external investor perspective
The book doesn't mention the dates when Medallion was closed to external investment but does dutifully include an appendix
with the stellar returns and has a handy returns comparison table with Buffett, Soros Dalio etc. 
It also alludes to the fact, but does not dwell upon it,  that when the alternative funds were opened (RIEF etc.) they drew in 
huge amounts of investment but hit early drawdowns on the quant fund crashes in 2007 on much larger sums than Medallion.
The sums mentioned in the text suggested there must have redemptions on loss making positions...  
 
 
User avatar
Alan
Posts: 2957
Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
Contact:

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

January 20th, 2020, 8:57 pm

I finally got around to reading this piece. The fascinating thing is how Medallion's results substantially dominate those of a visitor from the future who already knew (over various horizons) whether or not the market would beat Treasury bills. I think we have to conclude that Simons is indeed a visitor from the future, or has one on his staff, or is talking with his future self as in the classic Robert Silverberg stock market story

 { NOW + n, NOW - n }
All had been so simple, so elegant, so profitable for ourselves. And then we met the lovely Selene and nearly were undone. She came into our lives during our regular transmission hour on Wednesday, October 7, 1987, between six and seven P.M. Central European Time. The moneymaking hour. I was in satisfactory contact with myself and also with myself. (Now — n was due on the line first, and then I would hear from (now + n) ...

(Well, I am such a huge fan, almost all his stories seem classics to me).
 
User avatar
katastrofa
Posts: 7431
Joined: August 16th, 2007, 5:36 am
Location: Alpha Centauri

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

February 5th, 2020, 3:11 pm

From my perspective of a former physicist (my hobbyhorse Berry phase goes in pair with Chern numbers), Simons is just a name attached to one of multiple Chern's theories - probably for better discrimination :-)
 
Mercadian
Posts: 39
Joined: July 24th, 2020, 4:22 pm

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

August 6th, 2020, 5:03 pm

The man who solved the markets? more like the man who solved the tax code...
 
User avatar
staassis
Posts: 27
Joined: April 12th, 2014, 5:10 pm

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

August 8th, 2020, 11:12 am

So the book mentions roughly 15 people at RenTech. What do the other 2,000 people do?

Well, this is more of a rhetorical question. Through a couple of intermediaries, I have heard that only a small, "core" group works on trading strategies. The rest perform IT-ish "sanitation", etc... So a life of a typical RenTech employee is not much different from an equally prosaic life of a typical employee at MS, GS and such.

Otherwise, the book states many interesting facts: everybody in the core group having access to everybody's code and still not quitting,...
 
leptoq
Posts: 350
Joined: February 15th, 2018, 4:42 pm

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

August 18th, 2020, 3:50 pm

It's an amusing book, I enjoyed reading it.  The journalist did a good job collecting fairy tales about Rentec employers. Nevertheless he never mentioned one fact about one deranged employee who shot his wife before shooting himself. 
http://longisland.news12.com/story/34769992/police-identify-port-jefferson-murder-suicide-victims

If my memory doesn't fail me RenTec used to have a gun range in their headquarters. The geeks with the guns, huh?