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

by Gregory Zuckerman

A year or two earlier, Baum couldn’t stop thinking about math; now it was trading that occupied his mind. Lying on a beach with his family one morning during the summer of 1979, Baum mulled the extended weakness in the value of the British pound. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that the currency could only fall in value. One expert who advised Simons and Baum on their trading made so much selling pounds that he named his son Sterling.

The goal of quants like Simons was to avoid relying on emotions and gut instinct. Yet, that’s exactly what Simons was doing after a few difficult weeks in the market. It was a bit like Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane scrapping his statistics to draft a player with the clear look of a star.