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

by Gregory Zuckerman

trading, as in mathematics, it’s rare to achieve breakthroughs in midlife.

“It’s one thing to have good ideas, it’s another to recognize when others do.

“He had the buy-low part, but he didn’t always have the sell-high part,”

humans can’t forecast prices.”

“Humans are most predictable in times of high stress—they act instinctively and panic.

“We’re right 50.75 percent of the time . . . but we’re 100 percent right 50.75 percent of the time,” Mercer told a friend. “You can make billions that way.” Mercer likely wasn’t sharing his firm’s exact trading edge—his larger point was that Renaissance enjoyed a slight advantage in its collection of thousands of simultaneous trades, one that was large and consistent enough to make an enormous fortune.

He once told a colleague that he preferred the company of cats to humans.

not unusual