The greatest trader of all time came from outside of finance and was a math professor that entered the markets with a beginners mind with a focus on the math and formulas that would work in trading.
In 1982, 40 year old retired mathematics professor Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund and staffed it with mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists to pioneer the world of algorithmic trading. Since 1988, Jim Simonsโ Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund has returned an average of +66.1% a year and made himself, business partners, and employees wealthy in the process.
His performance record on trading capital makes him the greatest trader of all time. His skills in math, business administration, along with recruiting the best minds in academia made him a genius in the hedge fund world.
The most amazing thing about Jim Simons feat of mastering the financial markets is that he never took a class on finances, was not interested in business, and hired people outside Wall Street to work at his hedge fund. His team brought a new perspective to the world of trading by looking at it with a new perspective and through the filter of math and not predictions, egos, or opinions.
Renaissance Technologies specializes in systematic trading using quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses. The Medallion Fund uses a better and broader version of Leonard Baumโs mathematical models, that were made even better by algebraist James Ax.
It explored the correlations that could be used to create an edge to profit from. The Medallion fund was named by Simons and Ax after the math awards that they had both won. The Medallion Fund has the best record for long term consistent returns in history.
Jim Simons retired in late 2009. The fund is now managed by Peter Brown a computer scientists who specializes in computational linguistics who was hired by Renaissance in 1993 while working at IBM Research. Simons remains a non-executive chairman and still has money in its funds, mostly in the incredibly profitable Medallion black-box strategy. From the measurement of his return performance Jim Simons is currently and best money manager and trader on earth based on his numbers. Renaissance currently has over $110 billion worth of assets under management, most of it is capital from the employees of the firm.
Math and computer science may be the most important tools for any trader to master based on his results.