We all know that the secret to getting insanely rich is to accumulate assets and avoid liabilities. The tricky part is knowing in advance which asset gets us there faster.
Jim Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, a former Cold war code breaker and a famous mathematician. He is known in the scientific community for co-developing the Chern–Simons theory.
Simons and algebraist James Ax started a hedge fund and named it Medallion in honor of the math awards that they had won. The Medallion fund used mathematical models to explore correlations from which they could profit.
The performance of the Medallion fund has astounded everyone. If you had invested $1,000 in the Medallion Fund, after 30 years, you would now have $20 million (after fees).
Since the early days, Renaissance has been collecting and curating vast data archives of everything. From economic metrics to the weather to trading sentiment and a million other variables.
Medallion’s strategy involves holding thousands of short-term positions, both long and short, at any given time. The fund makes high-frequency trades but has also held positions for up to one or two weeks.
The Medallion Fund has employed mathematical models to analyze and execute trades, many of them automated.These models are based on analyzing as much data as can be gathered, then looking for non-random movements to make predictions.