The roots of Simons’s investing style reached as far back as Babylonian times, when early traders recorded the prices of barley, dates, and other crops on clay tablets, hoping to forecast future moves. In the middle of the sixteenth century, a trader in Nuremberg, Germany, named Christopher Kurz won acclaim for his supposed ability to forecast twenty-day prices of cinnamon, pepper, and other spices. Like much of society at the time, Kurz relied on astrological signs, but he also tried to back-test his signals, deducing certain credible principles along the way,
