Notes
A brilliant interview with James Simons about science, business and his philanthropic activities.
It is great to see how his scientific achievements on mathematics (basic science as he likes to underline), underpinned his view on how to set his Hedge Fund and also how influenced the work of the foundation he has created → simonsfoundation.org
In terms of science, it stands out the timeframe he took to produce great science, in some cases > 6 years, but at the end he produced more than small incremental knowledge in his domain, but one that made major advances and helped others in other domains of science to also advance (vs. the actual set-up of publish or perish, where you need to publish whatever to stay afloat in academia).
The thing that impressed me the most was how he recruited for his business; the basic tenets were:
Hire smart people (independently of the scientific background)
knowing finance was not a requirement,
should have a PhD in Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, Statistics or Computer Science,
Someone that has done good science previously - measured based on the papers they had produced in the last 5 years.
Create the environment to work as a team,
Provide the best infrastructure to support the teams,
Give full autonomy to explore the domain.
Finally, if you want to see how it went business wise, just look at the below charts, where you can see his fund “The Medallion Fund” generated an average gross return of 66% form 1988-2018 and net average return of 39.3%., thus if you invested $100 in 1988 you would get $398.723.879 by 2018.
Hope you enjoy it as much as i did!
