James Simons, who helped lead a quantitative revolution that has swept the financial world, is stepping back from his hedge fund on the heels of a terrible year for clients, but a terrible one for investors. company operations.
Mr. Simons, among the largest financial backers of Democractic candidates in recent years, told investors that he was stepping down as chairman of the board of directors of Renaissance Technologies LLC as Jan. 1.
“I believe the time is right: This move has been many years in the making,” Mr Simons said in a letter to delegates a few weeks ago. Mr Simons, who will be 83 in April, will continue to serve on the company’s board.
A professor of mathematics and code-breaker, Mr. Simons led Renaissance to one of the most successful investment firms in history by relying on a new way of investing.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when most of the investment world read annual reports, chatted with executives and relied on intuition, Mr. Simons wanted to allow computers to be integrated. make his trading decisions. He and his colleagues – all from the worlds of mathematics and science – built predictive models that were able to detect unknown market patterns, in part through the use of early versions of machine learning. Finally, Mr. Simons raised a fortune of more than $ 25 billion, which he has used to support Democrats like President Joseph Biden and HIllary Clinton, even as his Renaissance colleague Robert Mercer. in 2016 to become one of the then presidents- Donald Trump’s most important candidate. Today, most trading comes from both quantitative and other “non-financial” stock traders, and prediction algorithms are at the heart of most technology companies.