[ackbar03]

I think your definitely idolizing them a bit too much. Maybe a bit ahead of the curve but not doing anything super fancy (although I guess those two statements are somewhat contradictory).

Just from snippets I've sort of heard/read about, I think they were one of the earlier ones to move into HFT (although maybe not the super fast infrastructure heavy type these days). In some interview Simmons said they realized returns became more predictable they shorter the time frame they looked at and they pushed it to the extreme. I think there is also reason to suspect that they may have adopted some NLP strategies early on as well since Mercer was involved in that or something, and they initially hired a bulk of their team from IBMs NLP research team. Also they did not dodge 2008 completely, in some interview they said they lost close to / more than half their portfolio value in the market crash, but because they didn't have stupid leverage or outside investors or something like that, and also because they trusted their models, they didn't sell and held on. So maybe just slightly better execution but mostly the same.

Anyways, I was reading about these guys back in 09 when quant trading wasn't so blown up. Now every kid whose decent at math seems to want to be the next renaissance, which just makes me feel like the best years for that are over.

[carnitine]

I’m not idolising them, I’m just framing their returns in the correct perspective. The probability of any of the top firms existing by chance is astronomically small, that’s all I’m saying. Same is true of BlueCrest etc.

As far as I know the NLP stuff is more to do with similar techniques being applied to market data, rather than actual speech recognition or whatever. Hidden Markov models and the like.

[WanderPanda]

I’m not so sure the best years are over. The passive investing trend might work to the contrary and make the markets less efficient

[randomcarbloke]

fancy or not an edge is an edge.