Medallion fund: a remarkably successful quant trading firm built by scientists

bloomberg.com

75 points·moh_maya··8 comments

> Eventually the scientists went so far as to develop an in-house programming language for their models rather than settle for a numbercentric option such as ASCII, which was popular at the time.

I have fond memories of the late 1980s. The ASCII programming language was very popular at the time.

Is this sarcasm? I can't find any reference to an ASCII programming language.

Yes.

All these funds have some commonalities: highly statistical in nature, high probability trades, correlations, algorithms executing trades. But finding out any of the internals of these funds is next to impossible unless one has an "in".

Does anyone on HN have some perspective on how these funds operate (renaissance, AQR funds etc.) ?

I can't offer too much insight, sorry. But I will say the "quant" fund label is very broad. RenTec and AQR both hire PhDs and use computers to trade, but AQR offers mutual funds with daily liquidity and they publicly disclose much more info - RenTec as a private fund has more flexibility in what it can do. Correspondingly, how a fund uses risk and takes on leverage can make a big difference.

Why even write an article like this? Bored journalist around the holidays or great stealth advertising for their "open" institutional funds?

@vfulco Medallion is germane now for a reason the article doesn't mention:

Robert Mercer is the primary benefactor behind Breitbart. He was the number three donor to conservative causes this election cycle (behind Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer).

The money coming out of Medallion helped put Trump in 1600.

thanks for pointing this out! any idea why ultra rich would want alt-right to succeed? isn't alt-right kind of about de-stabilizing the system which could screw with their money?

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