Mind Over Money's Podcast

While Renaissance Technologies makes most other hedge funds look foolish, even the independent trader can copy their discipline   NFLX, PANW   Long-time followers of mine in this bull market know that every quarter I go over the holdings of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies because they were one of the early quant houses that made algo trading so successful and popular.   The founder, Jim Simons, was a mathematics professor in the 1970s who never thought about the markets much. He sort of stumbled into testing some theories on stocks, and the rest is history as he was pulled headlong into the markets and created a powerhouse with over $50 billion AUM (assets under management).   And Simons made a point of not hiring MBAs, traders, or anyone with a background in finance. He only wanted physicists, engineers and other quantitative problem-solvers to come work for him and mine the data of markets to find unique correlations, patterns and new edges.   What kind of data patterns and correlations are they after?