With some 20,000 devotees, a start-up financial video service sells the strategies of insiders, with a side of lifestyle television. Hedge Funds, Banking and Financial Institutions, Stocks and Bonds, Renaissance Technologies
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Dutch regulator mistakenly reveals Soros short positions The Dutch market regulator mistakenly published the details of hundreds of previously private short selling trades by international hedge funds, including bets against Dutch banks by George Soros and the positions of Renaissance Technologies' enigmatic Medallion fund. An error by the AFM, the Net...
At the 2013 conference, Brown referenced an example they once shared with outside Medallion investors: By studying cloud cover data, they found a correlation between sunny days and rising markets from New York to Tokyo. “It turns out that when it’s cloudy in Paris, the French market is less likely to go up than when it’s sunny in Paris,” he said. It wasn’t a big moneymaker, though, because it was true only slightly more than 50 percent of the time. Brown continued: “The point is that, if there were signals that made a lot of sense that were very strong, they would have long ago been traded out. ... What we do is look for lots and lots, and we have, I don’t know, like 90 Ph.D.s in math and physics, who just sit there looking for these signals all day long. We have 10,000 processors in there that are constantly grinding away looking for signals.”
The Medallion Fund, an employees-only offering for the quants at Renaissance Technologies, is the blackest box in all of finance.
Getting 5 to 10% return is pretty good. Getting the #yuge returns that Renaissance does is epic. Proof that math, facts and education matters. So it’s ironic that Robert Mercer supported Trump and “secretly” gave $10 million to Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News.
Sixty miles east of Wall Street, a spit of land shaped like a whale’s tail separates Long Island Sound and Conscience Bay. The mansions here, with their long, gated driveways and million-dollar views, are part of a hamlet called Old Field. Locals have another name for these moneyed lanes: the Renaissance Riviera.
That’s because the area’s wealthiest residents, scientists all, work for the quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, based in nearby East Setauket. They are the creators and overseers of the Medallion Fund—perhaps the world’s greatest moneymaking machine. Medallion is open only to Renaissance’s roughly 300 employees, about 90 of whom are Ph.D.s, as well as a select few individuals with deep-rooted connections to the firm.
The fabled fund, known for its intense secrecy, has produced about $55 billion in profit over the last 28 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, making it about $10 billion more profitable than funds run by billionaires Ray Dalio and George Soros. What’s more, it did so in a shorter time and with fewer assets under management. The fund almost never loses money. Its biggest drawdown in one five-year period was half a percent.
For outsiders, the mystery of mysteries is how Medallion has managed to pump out annualized returns of almost 80 percent a year, before fees.
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Competitors have identified some likely reasons for the fund’s success, though. Renaissance’s computers are some of the world’s most powerful, for one. Its employees have more—and better—data. They’ve found more signals on which to base their predictions and have better models for allocating capital. They also pay close attention to the cost of trades and to how their own trading moves the markets.
Simons is already well-known: math genius, professor at MIT and Harvard, recipient of the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, and co-creator of the Chern-Simons theory. He was also a code breaker for the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he worked finding messages amid the noise.
The goal of quant trading is similar: to build models that find signals hidden in the noise of the markets. Often they’re just whispers, yet they’ll help predict how the price of a stock or a bond or a barrel of oil might move. The problem is complex. Price movements depend on fundamentals and flows and the sometimes irrational behavior of people who are doing the buying and selling.
“Renaissance was started by a couple of mathematicians,” Brown said in a 2013 conference for computational linguists. “They had no idea how to program. They’re people who learned how to program by reading computer manuals, and that’s not a particularly good way of learning.” He and Mercer had learned how to build large systems—with many people working on them simultaneously—which was a skill set they used to Renaissance’s advantage. Not that their new field was without challenges. “It’s all noise in finance,” he said.
More IBM veterans joined them on Long Island, including Stephen and Vincent Della Pietra, the string-theorist twins; Lalit Bahl, who had created algorithms to recognize human speech; Mukund Padmanabhan, whose specialty was digital-signal processing; David Magerman, a programmer; and Glen Whitney, who wrote software as a summer intern. “The takeaway from IBM was that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” says Chan. “They all worked together.”
