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by throwaway12245 1174 days ago
Renaissance Technologies: "Renaissance's flagship Medallion fund, which is run mostly for fund employees,[10] is famed for the best track record on Wall Street, returning more than 66 percent annualized before fees and 39 percent after fees over a 30-year span from 1988 to 2018"[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies
2 comments

coming full circle, Peter Brown and Robert Mercer of Renaissance started off doing statistical language modeling at IBM and their 1992 paper in Computational Linguistics is cited in the BloombergGPT paper.
that only works as long as they are small enough. IIRC thats why they are very selective about taking investments.
They haven't taken outside investments for many years because of capacity constraints with their strategy. It goes beyond that actually: they force people to take dividends of their profits, because the strategy can only handle so much capital before marginal returns plunge-- otherwise they would quickly have too much capital if they kept reinvesting their cumulative profits.
I thought the strategies varied over the years: early adopter by jumping on different bleeding edge strategies. Strategies restricted by limited fund size.
To add: “So, how does the Medallion Fund make money? It finds individual patterns in data and exploits each pattern just enough to turn a small profit. And when you add up all of those small profits, you end up making a lot of money.”
The fund has $165 billion in discretionary assets under management