In public, Simons professed confidence, encouraging his team to keep at it. “We have to keep trying,” he said in a group meeting in the summer of 1995, still an intimidating presence despite his shorts and sandals. Privately, though, Simons wondered if he was wasting his time. Maybe the team would never figure out equities, and Renaissance was destined to remain a relatively small futures-trading firm. It was a conclusion Laufer, Patterson, and others in the futures group already had reached. “We had given it years already,” Patterson says. “If I was calling the shots, I might very well have
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