The $25B Day Trader that Even Warren Buffett Acknowledges

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Jim Simons is the world’s richest mathematician. Forbes estimates his wealth to be at a staggering $24.6b currently. Jim Simons gained most of this wealth through conquering the world of trading by starting the “quant revolution” with his company Renaissance Technologies and the Medallion fund. The Medallion fund has the best track-record of any hedge fund in history. It has averaged a 62.9% return per year before fees, and 37.2% net of fees, verses 11% for the S&P 500. That is the most impressive investment record I’ve ever heard about, it’s even better than Warren Buffett’s, although it has been accomplished with a much smaller capital.

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Top 5 takeaways from The Man who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman:
00:00 Intro
02:50 1. From $0 to $25b
09:58 2. Medallion is a Short-Term Predictive Algorithm
13:44 3. Medallion Requires TONS of Data
16:05 4. Medallion is Based on Advanced Mathematics
17:55 5. Don’t Try This at Home!

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My goal with this channel is to help you make more money and improve your personal finances. How to become a millionaire? There are many ways to get there – investing in the stock market, becoming a stock trader, doing real estate investing, or why not becoming an entrepreneur? But whether you are interested in how to invest in stocks or investing strategies for creating passive income with rental properties – I hope to be able to provide you with a solution (or at least an idea) here. Warren Buffett - the greatest investor of our time - says that you should fill your mind with competing ideas and then see what makes sense to you. This channel is about filling your mind with those ideas. And in the process – upgrading your money-making toolbox.

[JeanCharlesEvrard]

To my eyes, Jim Simons is not a "day trader" he's a brilliant mathematician and statistician. Moreover, almost nobody can replicate what he does whereas value investing is open to virtually everyone. Really good video as always!

[ariavachier-lagravech.]

The thing about Jim Simon is that he is a brilliant mathematicians whereas most people doing day trading is not brilliant mathematicians

[gentgjonbalaj]

In 2016 I went to a topology and geometry conference where I met Simons. He actually gave a talk about his whole life. If I recall correctly, he said he went to Berkeley where he solved a famous open geometry problem. Then after his PhD he lost his passion for research in topology and started cracking codes for the CIA. A couple of years in he was fired and that started day trading. He said he day traded for a year or 2 and made good money. He acknowledged that most of his profits where really due to lucky and then noticed that the market has a sort of structure to it. So he called up a bunch of brilliant people he knew and started applying statistics and probability theory to gain a hedge in the market. Bam the first quant fund was born. He is honestly fuckin brilliant. This man has a whole theory behind that studies vector bundles over manifolds called chern-Simons theory. None the less when your really smart you can do what ever you want. Haha

[gearsNtools]

so basically a bunch of math PHD's figured out how to print a money printer, then they got bored and made a bigger one!

[EphReinhard]

Hollywood mathematicians: Live and die lonely and neurotic and sad and broke.
Simons: Hold My Billions

[ApplesOranges]

We appreciate the digest on the Simons book. Much obliged. Please keep up the good work, Skol!

[jfrd-pwhk]

Jim Simons is a super-genius. His moneymaking method is hard to replicate.
Buffett and Munger are smart too but they use a money-making model that can be replicated by more people.

[trdfrguson]

I watched the annual meeting and this is the first time I have heard Warren and Charlie say anything positive about a short-term trader.

[Jay-pcev]

Kind of off-topic, but I appreciate how YouTubers provide information with pictures and animations it helps me grasp concepts 10x faster than I would if you tried to just tell me. I've learned more in a couple months than 4 years in high school. This is definitely the new and best wave of learning.

[edoardoRss]

He is still one of the most intelligent man on earth.
His mathematical discoveries are been used now

[Masfugo]

Next time someone says "why should I learn math?" I will give this video to them

[realestalex]

I have always thought that the only reason why this day trading patterns seem to work is because the whole lot of day traders point them out at the same time and move the market in that direction, it makes sense to me that a far more clever day trader would end up taking the profits from them.

[Oxazepam]

Medallion fund must be making a ton of money atm because there has never been as much day trader noobs.

[calvinfernandez]

Love your videos man. They are alway high quality

[StevenSmith]

Well I’m going to try and use Neural Networks to do the same as him with at least some of my portfolio. I think the risk is worth it.

[SuperNovaJinckUFO]

Trading and investing are two fundamentally different activities, and they should never be confused for one another. Investing is the practice of purchasing and owning value generators (i.e. things that are going to give you a return over time). Trading is the practice of taking advantage of the market, essentially buying things in low demand to sell them in high demand. There's some overlap between them, in the fact that when you invest you don't want to overpay, and when you're trading assets their demand is usually going to be correlated with their potential for return as an investment. But otherwise, you need to approach the two activities with two completely separate mindsets. What will work for one, will almost certainly not work for the other.

[justicewarrior]

He's NEVER been a day trader!!!
He used mathematical models created by him to make software that trades for him

[kal]

Summary: Medallion is closed to outside money. They use a complex math model (AI) to earn money from short term trades.

[Arief]

I use the service of a fiduciary under a great broker, that is the most effective way I have known for his expertise saving me from loses

[garyk.nedrow]

Quite apart from the algorithms, technical analysis, and mountains of data mentioned in this video to explain the workings of Simon's hedge fund, we might also note that he had acquired substantial capital (his own and that of other people) in launching Medallion. He didn't build this track record starting with a $25, 000 brokerage account.