The Man Who Solved the Market
How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019
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4.5 • 42 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BUSINESS BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019
'Reads more like a delicious page-turning novel...Put it on your holiday gift list for your favourite hedge-fund honcho' Bloomberg
'A compelling read' Economist
'Captivating' New York Times book review
Jim Simons is the greatest moneymaker in modern financial history. His record bests those of legendary investors, including Warren Buffett, George Soros and Ray Dalio. Yet Simons and his strategies are shrouded in mystery. The financial industry has long craved a look inside Simons's secretive hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies and veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman delivers the goods.
After a legendary career as a mathematician and a stint breaking Soviet codes, Simons set out to conquer financial markets with a radical approach. Simons hired physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists - most of whom knew little about finance - to amass piles of data and build algorithms hunting for the deeply hidden patterns in global markets. Experts scoffed, but Simons and his colleagues became some of the richest in the world, their strategy of creating mathematical models and crunching data embraced by almost every industry today.
As Renaissance became a major player in the financial world, its executives began exerting influence on other areas. Simons became a major force in scientific research, education and Democratic politics, funding Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign. While senior executive Robert Mercer is more responsible than anyone else for the Trump presidency - he placed Steve Bannon in the campaign, funded Trump's victorious 2016 effort and backed alt-right publication Breitbart. Mercer also impacted the success of the Brexit campaign as he made significant investments in Cambridge Anatlytica. For all his prescience, Simons failed to anticipate how Mercer's activity would impact his firm and the world.
In this fast-paced narrative, Zuckerman examines how Simons launched a quantitative revolution on Wall Street, and reveals the impact that Simons, the quiet billionaire king of the quants, has had on worlds well beyond finance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A gripping biography of investment game changer Jim Simons arrives from journalist Zuckerman (The Greatest Trade Ever). With little experience in business before he started trading at age 40, Simons made for an unlikely innovator. Nonetheless, this book reveals, Simons created the "greatest money-making machine in financial history" with his company, Renaissance Technologies, founded in 1982, and particularly with the firm's flagship Medallion hedge fund, founded in 1988. Showing a flair for the surprising and dramatic statement, Zuckerman proposes that Simons eclipses the more famous likes of Warren Buffett and George Soros as "arguably the most successful trader in the history of modern finance," with a net worth of about $23 billion. A theoretical mathematician and former math professor, he was the first to take a mathematical, data-driven approach to investing. Gambling that computers using predictive mathematical models could beat human judgment, he won, and changed the industry. Zuckerman skillfully recounts Simons's backstory his comfortable childhood in Newton, Mass.; his time spent crafting code-breaking algorithms for the National Security Agency during the 1960s the salient details of his revolutionary work, and his failures as well as his successes. With a potential recession looming, readers looking to understand how the economy got where it is should eat this up.
