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Comment by rosstaylor90 | Hacker News Reader

Ed Thorp’s Princeton/Newport Partners was the first great quant hedge fund.

Highly recommend Poundstone’s Fortune’s Formula. Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp. This is the book (along with A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street by Lo and MacKinlay) that got me interested in finance.

Jim Simons/Renaissance were the first great quant hedge fund. For the last 30 years their annualized returns, after fees, is 39%.

The medallion fund began at Axcom under Elwyn Berlekamp and RenTech bought it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Axcom_Trading_Adv...

Rather more precisely, Simons hired Ax to pursue a dream he'd first had with Baum in the 70s, using math to predict markets. Ax had some success, but the Medallion Fund didn't take off until after he left. Berlekamp gets a little credit, but wasn't really there long enough to have major impact. If you want to know who did the real work, figure out who Simons paid the most.

Who did he pay the most?

And before fees, like 80-100%. But PNP came before RenTec and Medallion.

Yeah, came hear to post this. Recently read his autobiography "A Man For All Markets." Simply an incredible and creative man. From beating blackjack to roulette, to discovering Black Scholes before Black and Sholes.

PNP changed the game like no other. Really sad Giuliani and his thugs took him down.

Thorpe is epitome of the best of humanity: creative, fearless, and tenacious. His life story was really inspiring to me.

The book comes highly recommended.

> Thorpe is epitome of the best of humanity: creative, fearless, and tenacious.

I guess we see what we want to see.

There are a lot of little red flags littered throughout the book. One thing that rankled me was his assertion that he independently discovered Black-Scholes before Merton/Black/Scholes and offered as evidence a chart that post-dated the original paper. There's a lot of stuff like that in the book.

Don't get me wrong, this is a person with many admirable characteristics. Just don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Ed Thorp's "Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One" is one of the best books ever written about quant trading...despite not being about quant trading.

The guy whose math provided the nucleus of RenTech and the guy who invented the game of life wrote this:

https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Ways-Your-Mathematical-Plays/...

Vol. 4 begins with the study of the solitaire game that is on every Cracker Barrel table.

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