On Jim Simons // "The Man Who Solved The Market"

Jim Simons passed away today. In memory, I was reviewing some of my notes on his journey and learnings (mainly drawn from the book “The man who solved the market”) and thought I’d share my raw notes & personal book review more broadly. Enjoy!

“Emperors want empires” —> “Jim wants to do things that matter. If he was going to do a fund, he wanted to be the best”

Fun good read on Jim Simons and rentech. The firm has been a fascination for me for years so it was nice to finally have more detail on how it started and became so famous. It’s so impressive how he reached the pinnacle in multiple areas (mathematics, code breaking, investing), and all oriented around a north star of solving really hard problems. Clearly he was very driven from the start and wanted to tackle larger things for both personal, but more importantly, for beauty & aesthetic reasons. It’s a lens on doing good work that I hadn’t heard before.

I was surprised by how much trouble Simons had — almost a decade — before he started seeing really good results. Despite being a math genius, he only started being successful after building a brilliant team to help make the necessary discoveries. He hired the right people, created the right environment, took care of logistics, and pushed on a key insight (model to trade). He couldn’t have done it by himself.

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