Three Mysterious Philanthropists Fund Fourth-Largest U.S. Charity (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Three Mysterious Philanthropists Fund Fourth-Largest U.S. Charity (2014)

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37 pointsdeepnotderp14 comments

I interviewed with TGS and two friends of mine work there. They're not "the secret Renaissance Technologies." The only commonality between them is that they're both successful quant hedge funds. They have completely different origins and tend to hire researchers from different areas of science. You might as well call Edgestream the secret RenTec since it also flies under the radar and was founded by someone from Renaissance.

This is an editorialized title which isn't endorsed by the article's content. Moreover it's from 2014. I'm not sure what sparked the sudden interest in these companies on Hacker News this week, maybe it's the new book about Simons and RenTec. But the article's pretty out of date and it doesn't give much info.

Worth noting that TGS is also several times smaller than RenTec. They only just passed 100 employees very recently. It's true they're secretive and they like to hire academics. But that describes a large number of really good quant shops. By design, you don't know who they are and they like it that way. Most don't even have websites!

If possible, I'd be interested if you could expand on your point regarding RenTec and TGS hiring from completely different areas of science.

Speaking of Edgestream, are there any other successful funds started by RenTec alum? I know of FQS and Merfin, I believe Merfin has been absorbed by Edgestream at this point. Similarly, I asked this question in a prior thread recently but are there any successful offshoots of Thorpe's Princeton/Newport or TGS?

What are some smaller funds of high caliber that little is known about, if you're willing to say?

Can you elaborate on how they're different?

The general point was that they are a quant fund comparable to RenTec but even more secretive and less well known. I understand they have very different origin stories

We've switched to the HTML doc title and added 2014 above. Submitted title was "TGS Management – The Secret Renaissance Technologies", which broke the guidelines ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." — https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

It's a great submission otherwise! not discussed before on HN as far as I could find.

I'm guessing it's the book: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...

I was listening to an Ed Thorp interview and he hinted at TGS (though he didn't name-drop).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPSaHIPwb8&feature=youtu.be... (44:30 - 44:55)

Stories like these always add fire to the attractiveness of hedge funds, but I keep wondering whether it's still possible to have such wild success in this area these days. The field is so incredibly crowded now compared to a few decades ago, and every finance kid with some decent Quant background probably dreams of working in one

A while back I met with a large number of quants for <very large and famous quant fund>, if that's representative of the field, I can understand why rentec, tgs etc. would dominate

Up until a few years back, crypto was left completely behind. Still possible to beat the quants and the suits, iff you know where to look.

http://archive.is/YFG4Z

More: https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/172972/hedge-fund-j...

Im more curious as to how they were found: can not even the richest of persons be completely secretive of their money?

Secretive from whom? I'd kind of hope that as people get richer it gets harder to hide vast sums from the tax authorities and the antiterrorism investigators, but that appears not to be the case.

p^2 - 1 = 24n [1]

[1] https://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/fifteen.htm

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