RIP to the man who beat the efficient market hypothesis

Jim claimed to have a mutation, according to a book I read, that prevented the usual consequences of smoking and is why he didn't get sick despite smoking so much for so long...not even a lingering cough, let alone cancer. That is how he rationalized the habit when asked. The guy was super-human in every way, not just being super smart, but immune to smoking. Smoking is almost always bad and does not just mean using your body up, but actually shortening one's lifespan by 10 years, so you have less time to use your body at all for that matter.

If that same $100 had performed like the Medallion Fund did starting from that same year, it would be worth something like ~$400,000,000. Rumor had it that Jim Simons would fund economists to specifically teach the efficient market hypothesis, just to demoralize his future competitors.

It would not because money was being pulled out. Fund size was capped at 10 billion.

The EMH still works and is applicable despite the success of his fund. The EMH is more about how the market responds to news and information. RenTec is like Google in the sense it makes lots of money from many tiny actions, that being trades instead of ad-clicks. If Google were like a hedge fund, it would be like RenTec in that sense in that it would return considerable profit to its employees. Same for Goldman or market markets.

In reality there are local optima and other sticky structures due to the discrete nature of the world. In fact being able to find/make such things is one main teachings of business thinking with things like "build a moat" and whatnot. But this is all conveniently forgotten when whitewashing market behavior as intrinsically objective and responsive, rather than the fickle thing it is.