Jim Simons retiring from Renaissance Technologies

zerohedge.com

20 pointsborism4 comments

FYI, Jim Simons is a math PhD who runs one of the world's most successful hedge funds, that trades mostly algorithmically and as far as I know, mostly hires CS, math, and physics grads and not so much finance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons for more info.

Hmm -- my understanding is they were one of the biggest low latency trading shops. Biggest in the sense of percentage of profits generated this way. Maybe some of the changes the SEC is pushing through lead to this.

Also, he's stupidly fucking rich. Sometimes calling in rich is the right thing to do.

>biggest low latency trading shops

RenTec always made money from superior quant analytics. Like almost everyone else in quant business, they used high volume, low latency trading, so it wasn't a differentiating factor. Hence I doubt SEC would have grounds to go after them on low latency or more specifically on front running orders using low latency capabilities.

It may just be, as one of the Zerohedge commenters mentioned, that Jim isn't about to be investigtated, he just sees the writing on the wall - SEC under political pressure to curtail HFT, which has been his bread and butter - so he's getting out at the top of the game and moving on to something else.

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