Jim Simons, a mathematician who became one of the most successful investors in modern financial history, has died at age 86.
A cutting-edge code breaker and geometer, Simons helped pioneer a revolution in trading, embracing a computer-oriented, quantitative style in the 1980s. He and his team employed trading algorithms and artificial intelligence well before these tools became popular in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Later, Simons became a political donor and an influential philanthropist in the worlds of science, health and education.
Simons, the son of a Boston shoe-factory executive, developed an early passion for mathematics and ignored the advice of the family physician who urged him to steer clear of the field because he wouldn't make a living. The warning proved misplaced.
Simons began his career as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He proved popular with students. One year, Simons amused a graduate class by confessing that he didn't know much about the topic -- partial differential equations -- but that he viewed teaching the course as a good way to learn.
Simons became restless, though. He started businesses with friends and dabbled in trading. Friends and family detected a desire for wealth.
"Jim understood at an early age that money is power," said Barbara Simons, his first wife, in an interview.
During the Cold War, in 1964, Simons joined a U.S. intelligence organization fighting the Soviet Union. He successfully broke Russian code but was fired when he took a public stance against the Vietnam War, upsetting his boss, who had spoken in favor of the war.
Simons joined Stony Brook University in Long Island, N.Y., where he ran the math department, developing an ability to recruit talented professors. At 37, he won geometry's highest honor, cementing his reputation in the world of mathematics. His Chern-Simons theory remains one of the most widely cited math papers of the past century.
Farewell to academia
In 1978, at the age of 40, Simons astonished his colleagues by quitting academia to try his hand at trading. He started an investment firm in a dreary Long Island strip mall, next to a women's clothing boutique and two doors from a pizza joint. At the time, many rivals were "fundamental" investors, chatting with corporate managers, scrutinizing balance sheets and relying on judgment and intuition to predict the ups and downs of investments.
Where others saw the zigs and zags as chaos, Simons, who had been trained to scrutinize large data sets, sensed that financial markets had more structure than most presumed.
"I developed a view that markets are not random, and [were] to some extent predictable," he later said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "There were statistical anomalies that could be exploited."
Early on, Simons traded like most others, reading the news and betting on gold prices and other investments. He scored gains but found it hard to endure the market's volatility. He developed stomach pains and berated himself for miscues.
"One day you're a genius, the next you feel like a dope," Simons said. "Fundamental trading gave me ulcers."
Simons set out to build an automated trading system that could discover fleeting and overlooked patterns in prices.
"I want models that will make money while I sleep," Simons told a friend at the time. "A pure system without humans interfering."
Simons hired scientists and mathematicians who used data going back centuries, predictive algorithms and machine learning. They often met with frustration.
"There's a pattern here; there has to be a pattern," Simons insisted one day.
At one point, their trading system inadvertently came close to cornering the market for Maine potatoes, to the dismay of regulators.
"We were viewed as flakes with ridiculous ideas," said Elwyn Berlekamp, who helped lead the firm in the 1980s, in a 2017 interview.
A payoff, finally
By 1990, Simons and his team, in their East Setauket, N.Y., headquarters, had identified ways to profit from currency, commodity and other markets using short-term patterns they had found. It took years longer, but the firm, by then called Renaissance Technologies, eventually discovered a way to make billions of dollars on stocks.
Their winning strategy: holding investments for short periods, even minutes, turning almost all of the trading decisions to computers -- and maintaining a veil of secrecy unlike almost any in Wall Street's history. Colleagues said one reason for the firm's success was Simons's ability to coax accomplished mathematicians and scientists to join his firm, and get them to work together -- his genius was managing genius.
"There is one GOAT [greatest of all time]. His name was Jim Simons," said Clifford Asness, managing and founding principal of AQR Capital Management. "That he was also a nice, kind, generous and caring man just makes it that much more amazing."
Between 1988 and 2018, Renaissance's flagship Medallion Fund produced gains of more than $100 billion and average annual returns of 66% before the firm's unusually hefty investor fees. The annual gains were 39% after those fees, a performance that topped those of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Peter Lynch and other investors during that period.
Medallion years ago became a fund only open to Simons and his colleagues.
Simons defied the odds in other ways. He was a regular cigarette smoker, lighting up in office buildings, restaurants and most everywhere else. Once, during a presentation to potential clients, Simons couldn't find an ashtray so he buried his cigarette butt deep in a sheet cake, amazing his guests.
Many converts
Today, more investors have embraced Simons's mathematical, computer-oriented approach. About one-third of all money is managed by so-called quant firms, and businesses in various industries rely on algorithms.
Away from trading, Simons suffered tragedy. One son, Paul, died in a bicycle accident. Another, Nicholas, died while scuba diving.
"My life is either aces or deuces," Simons once told a colleague.
Over the years, Simons reduced his role at the firm while focusing on science, education and other philanthropies. In 2010 he resigned as Renaissance's chief executive, yielding the job to longtime employee and former International Business Machines computer scientist Peter Brown. Simons retired as chairman in 2021.
Simons's health had deteriorated recently.
Simons gave away more than $6 billion during his lifetime. The Simons Foundation became a leading private funder of research in basic science. Simons also provided annual stipends of $15,000 to more than 1,000 top math and science teachers in New York City. He funded efforts to discover treatments for autism and spent $75 million to build an observatory in Chile to gain an understanding of creation's earliest moments.
In 2021, Simons and senior Renaissance executives agreed to pay up to $7 billion to settle a long-running tax probe related to how the firm converted short-term gains into long-term profits, which are typically taxed at a lower rate. It was one of the biggest settlements in Internal Revenue Service history.
Simons was one of the biggest backers of Democratic candidates, supporting the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Robert Mercer, then the co-CEO of Renaissance, in 2016 became one of then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump's most important backers.
In a 2019 speech, Simons offered a life lesson to MIT students.
"Be guided by beauty," he said. "It can be a way a company runs, or the way an experiment comes out, or the way a theorem comes out, but there's a sense of beauty when something is working well, almost an aesthetic to it."
Simons is survived by his wife, Marilyn Simons, and three children. His earlier marriage to Barbara Simons ended in divorce.