Jim Simmons died at the age of 86. The mathematician and investor founded in his mysterious Renaissance Technology Company (Renaissance Technologies)BaccaratvotiveThe greatest money-making machine in the eyes of many financiers.
His charitable foundation issued a statement saying he died today in New York City. The statement did not give a reason.
Simmons moved from academia to investment at the age of forty. Instead of adopting the standard practice of fund managers, he favours quantitative analysis, that is, looking for ways to predict price changes in the data. As a result of this methodBaccaratvotiveHe was so successful that he himself was called the "king of quantification".
Renaissance Technology is located in the secluded East Setauket, New York, about 60 miles east of Manhattan. At the company, Simmons avoids hiring Wall Street veterans. Instead, he employs mathematicians and scientists such as astrophysicists and code breakers to mine useful investment information from the data the company collects every day, from sunspots to overseas weather.
For more than three decades, Simmons has outperformed the market in terms of returns, although the math is getting cheaper and competitors manage funds by building their own complex algorithms, doing their best to emulate the success of the Renaissance.
"only a few people have really changed our view of the market," Theodore Aronson2008 Nian, founder of quantitative fund manager AJO Vista, told Bloomberg Markets magazine. "John Maynard Keynes is one of them, and Warren Buffett is one of them. So is Jim Simmons. "
Simmons, a former US government code breaker, declined to elaborate on how his best-known fund, Medallion, returned more than four times as much as the S & P 500. Even after deducting high fees, the fund achieved an astonishing annual return of nearly 40 per cent between 1988 and 2023, making Simmons and as many as three colleagues billionaires.
Simmons is estimated to be worth $31.8 billion, making him the 49th richest person in the world, according to the billionaire index.
