The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

by Gregory Zuckerman

“Bad ideas is good, good ideas is terrific, no ideas is terrible.”

Truth . . . is much too complicated to allow for anything but approximations. John von Neumann

I strongly believe, for all babies and a significant number of grownups, curiosity is a bigger motivator than money. Elwyn Berlekamp

No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story. Daniel Kahneman, economist

By 1997, Medallion’s staffers had settled on a three-step process to discover statistically significant moneymaking strategies, or what they called their trading signals. Identify anomalous patterns in historic pricing data; make sure the anomalies were statistically significant, consistent over time, and nonrandom; and see if the identified pricing behavior could be explained in a reasonable way.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. George Box, statistician