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

by Gregory Zuckerman

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

But the more modern and powerful MIPS (million instructions per second) computers

Erm. I don’t think that’s what MIPS stands for in this context, do your research. Well, here, this might’ve been a good place to look ;) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture

in 2011, the Mercers met conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart at a conference. Almost immediately, they were intrigued with his far-right news organization, Breitbart News Network, expressing interest in funding its operations. Breitbart introduced the Mercers to his friend, Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker, who drew up a term sheet under which the Mercer family purchased nearly 50 percent of Breitbart News for $10 million.

After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, the Mercers became even more disenchanted with the establishment. That year, Rebekah stood up before a crowd of Romney supporters at the University Club of New York and delivered a scathing and detailed critique of the Republican Party, arguing that its poor data and canvassing operations held candidates back.

Ok, but then fix that rather than going racist and anti-free trade, and supporting repressive regimes at the expense of democratic allies. :/

Bannon helped broker a deal for Mercer to invest in an analytics firm called Cambridge Analytica, the US arm of the British behavioral research company SCL Group. Cambridge Analytica specialized in the kinds of advanced data Mercer was accustomed to parsing at Renaissance, and the type of information that Rebekah said the GOP lacked. She urged organizations that benefited from her family’s funds to tap Cambridge’s sophisticated technological capabilities.

This passage doesn’t come with a citation, which it probably should. But just shows how much we need limits on influence of money on elections, given that this money went toward violating facebook members’ privacy—not that any Facebook member should’ve been surprise that this would happen.

He told attendees he had seen data indicating that mainstream Republicans, such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, would have difficulty winning. Only a true outsider with a sense of the voters’ frustrations could emerge victorious, Mercer argued. Others didn’t seem as convinced by his data.

Turns out he was completely correct. It’s still interesting, however, that the outside candidate would both win republican support in the primaries and win the election...given that he was extreme in his Republican views on social issues.

Mercer’s impact extended across the Atlantic. After Breitbart started an office in London, in 2012, it began supporting politician and former commodity trader Nigel Farage’s fledgling efforts to catapult the idea of the UK leaving the European Union from a fringe issue to a mainstream one. At some point, Mercer and Farage became friendly.

Why does Mercer think Brexit was good for Britain/the world/him? Hope we get to some explanation of his logic....

the Mercers initially backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz, having been impressed by his willingness to shut the government down over debt concerns in 2013. They gave a pro-Cruz super PAC more than $13 million, but when Cruz dropped out of the race in May of that year, Rebekah accepted an invitation to meet Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, for lunch at Trump Tower.

Eventually, they’d become Trump’s largest financial backers.

Rebekah made a beeline for the candidate. “It’s bad,” Trump acknowledged. “No, it’s not bad—it’s over,” she told Trump. “Unless you make a change.” She told Trump she had a way for him to turn the election around. “Bring in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway,” she said. “I’ve talked to them; they’ll do it.”18

Rebekah Mercer (Robert Mercer’s daughter) is responsible for bringing Bannon into the Trump campaign? Oy, and Trump was their backup guy after Cruz.

Clinton’s team reached out to Simons, saying that if he was going to make additional political donations that year, he should direct them to the party’s effort to win control of the Senate. The Clinton camp seemed so confident of victory that they deemed additional help for their own campaign unnecessary.

Oops.

Now the president-elect of the United States was making the hike out to Long Island to pay homage to Mercer. Between the $26 million he had spent on Republican causes, his daughter’s insistence that Trump tap Bannon and Conway to resuscitate his flailing campaign, and Breitbart News’s unflinching support for the Trump campaign, Bob and Rebekah Mercer were among those most responsible for Trump’s shocking victory.2

Mercer successfully lobbied for Senator Jeff Sessions to be chosen as attorney general, pushed hard to prevent Mitt Romney from becoming secretary of state, and played a role in the choice of lawyer Jay Clayton to lead the US Securities and Exchange Commission, even as her influence raised some eyebrows due to her father’s position as co-CEO of one of the nation’s largest hedge funds. Later, the president turned to one of Rebekah Mercer’s longtime associates, Leonard Leo, who ran the conservative Federalist Society, for guidance on nearly all of his judicial nominees. She also made plans to lead an outside group designated to support Trump’s agenda.

Wow.

By the middle of 2018, Bob and Rebekah Mercer were pulling back from politics. The Mercers had broken with Bannon soon after he was quoted making a critical comment about Trump’s family, leaving the Mercers without a political consigliere. In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Mercer made just under $6 million in disclosed political contributions, down from almost $10 million in the previous midterm elections in 2014, and over $25 million in 2016. “They’ve fallen off the grid,” a leading member of the conservative movement said of the Mercers in late 2018. “We don’t hear much from them.”

Or they’re hiding their contributions better?

By the summer of 2019, Renaissance’s Medallion fund had racked up average annual gains, before investor fees, of about 66 percent since 1988, and a return after fees of approximately 39 percent.

Seems the ratio of returns per and returns post fees should tell investors to still stay away...if only to push for better terms ;) but Thena again it’s been employee-only for a decade or more? Then again, anyone who thinks they’ve got a secret investing sauce who doesn’t maximize their own return via that investment strategy...is selling something. So kinda makes sense to keep their best approach in-house. But I guess they needed outside investors for a few years for them to enrich themselves enough to maximize the fund’s performance for themselves.