Jim Simons

Renaissance Technologies – Medallion Fund, 1988– · Profile

Not a classic value investor: mathematical short-term trading, not value investing

Historical: a partial record. These are holdings named in letters, filings or reports of the time, not a full portfolio.

Jim Simons, a prize-winning mathematician, built Renaissance Technologies' Medallion Fund on computer models that trade short-term patterns. It's the best-performing fund on record, but it's the opposite of value investing and its holdings have never been published.

Record

1988–2018: Medallion returned 66.1% a year before fees and 39.1% a year after fees, with about $104.5 billion in trading profits. (Barry Ritholtz (Bloomberg Opinion, via WealthManagement.com, 28 Oct 2019), reviewing Gregory Zuckerman, The Man Who Solved the Market)
1988–2023: an average of almost 40% a year after fees, which went as high as 5% of assets and 44% of profits. Medallion returned 56% net in 1990. (Fortune (Bloomberg) obituary, 10 May 2024)

About

Born 25 April 1938 in Massachusetts; died 10 May 2024 in New York City, aged 86. (fortune.com)
Mathematician who taught at MIT and Harvard and worked as an NSA codebreaker through the Institute for Defense Analyses. (ksat.com)
Chaired the Stony Brook mathematics department from 1968 to 1978 and co-created Chern–Simons theory (1974). (fortune.com)
Started the firm that became Renaissance Technologies in 1978, stepped down as CEO in 2010 and as chairman in 2021. (fortune.com)
Medallion returned outside investors' money and is open only to employees; Simons judged it could not run much more than about $10 billion. (wealthmanagement.com)

Medallion's holdings have never been disclosed. Renaissance's 13F filings cover its other funds, not Medallion, so we don't show them. The return figures are Gregory Zuckerman's reconstruction; Renaissance hasn't published them.

Past returns don’t predict future ones. Nothing here is investment advice.

Jim Simons

Record

About

Books and letters