Journalist Gregory Zuckerman’s biography of legendary quant hedge fund manager Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies.

One of the nice things about being sick in bed on a Saturday is that you can finish off an entire book from your pile in one sitting. And this book was a good one to spend a Saturday afternoon reading. I have to admit too that the genre of books about quants has always been really appealing to me. I can remember reading Emanuel Derman’s _My Life As A Quant _around 2007 and being enthralled. Granted, this was before the financial crisis and great recession that was just on the horizon and the mystique of hedge funds and quantitative finance were probably at their apogee, but there was still something I found viscerally appealing about a bunch of nerds invading Wall Street and slowly taking over things by just being betters.

I won’t try and recount the entire story here, but there were two things that struck me when reading this book. The first is that for all the brain power at Renaissance Technologies, they really aren’t using any fancy math to do what they do. This is something I’ve read before about them as well. It’s not like they are using cutting edge math to create sophisticated models of the market. The reality is they are using standard statistical arbitrage techniques to gain a very slight edge and then making lots of bets and using leverage to amplify returns. They haven’t “solved the market,” they’re just counting cards so to speak. They just do it really, really, really well.

The second is more of an annoyance. I had always assumed the Jim Simons had at some point developed the core strategies used at RenTech, but the reality is that he was basically just a manager. He was limping along for decades not doing particularly well before he found a team of people who really developed the strategies and infrastructure that made Renaissance Technologies so staggeringly successful. It’s always hard to apportion “credit” between the leaders and the doers in any technical venture, lord knows it is really hard to build a world class team and keep them focused an goal oriented, but as an engineer I still find it viscerally grating when the people who never wrote a line of code get all the credit.