"There's zero evidence that Simons and Renaissance do any insider trading." Is a better way to state it.
But all evidence points to a system that runs in a mostly automated manner, which would be the opposite of what you'd expect from an insider trader.
Someone who makes "gutsy calls" based on "intuition" like Steve Cohen is what I think most successful insider traders would look like.
Consider the stakes - you have a multibillion dollar sub-portfolio (Medallion has current AUM of $118B according to some random site called InsiderMonkey, idk whether its legit or not). In 2016, the AUM was reported at $76B. His returns literally don't make any sense. You can't be right all the time. Anyways, so literally you wanna use a small fraction of that to fund the construction of a small discreet, strategic team that acquires information to gain edge in public markets. Simons has background in signals intelligence, and despite his later work, wouldn't it be an extremely obvious avenue to just forcibly acquire knowledge that is non-public and then place trades accordingly?
Simplest explanation is its definitely illegal. Every couple years, you hire some algebraic geometry PhD and boom, you chalk up all your returns to magic math. Doesn't make any sense.
Seems like they do well during downturns too?
If you simply bought the S&P 500 in Jan 2016 and held until now, you are up 78%. (76 goes to 135)
If you bought in Dec 2016 and held til now, you’re up 49% (76 goes to 113)
I find “they roughly tracked the market over the time cited” to be a far simpler explanation than “they’re definitely doing illegal insider trading and covering it up with math mumbo-jumbo.”