Billionaire quant investing legend Jim Simons dies

Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that became one of the most profitable firms in history, has died at the age of 86.

Simons began his career as a mathematician, earning a mathematics degree from MIT in 1958 and a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1961 at the age of 23. After his doctorate, he briefly taught at MIT and Harvard before joining the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he worked as a code breaker for the National Security Agency.

He was dismissed for publicly opposing the Vietnam War but soon became head of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system.

Simons left academia to start Monometrics in 1978, later renamed Renaissance Technologies.

The firm's flagship Medallion fund, closed to outside investors since 1993, achieved an average annual return over 62% before fees and 39% after fees from 1988 to 2021, with only one losing year in 1989.

To illustrate its success, an investment of $1 in the Medallion fund in 1988 would have grown to nearly $42,000 by 2021 after fees. In comparison, the same investment in the S&P 500 would've only increased to $40.

The firm's secret sauce lay in its preference for recruiting mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists over traditional Wall Street professionals.

In 1994, Simons and his wife, Marilyn Simons, founded the Simons Foundation, which is dedicated to supporting scientists and organisations worldwide in advancing the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.

Simons Foundation president David Spergel said: "Jim was an exceptional leader who did transformative work in mathematics and developed a world-leading investment company."

"Together with Marilyn Simons, the current Simons Foundation board chair, Jim created an organisation that has already had enormous impact in mathematics, basic science and our understanding of autism."

Simons is survived by his wife, three children, five grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.