Hedge fund manager Jim Simons was 86 years old. He was good for NOK 345 billion.
Right now
The American’s passing was announced via a press release from the Simons Foundation on Friday evening.
James Harris Simons founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982 at the age of 44, after a successful career in mathematics and code-breaking.
He began investing in 1978 by looking for patterns in currencies, and was successful early on with his strategies.
The flagship fund Medallion Fund has brought in over 100 billion dollars in profits since 1988, money which has mainly gone to the company’s employees.
Read on E24+
This is how Jim Simons became one of the most successful investors of all time
From 1988 to 20232, Medallion had an annual return of just under 40 percent after taxes, according to Bloomberg.
That makes Simons one of the most successful investors of all time.
According to the Wall Street Journal book “The Man Who Solved the Market” in 2019, journalist Greg Zuckerman explains that Simon’s winning secret was to remove all emotion from the equation, and focus on cold hard facts.
– There are only a few individuals who have really changed the way we look at the markets, Theodore Aronson, the founder of the investment company AJO Vista told Bloomberg magazine in 2008.
– John Maynard Keynes is one of the few. Warren Buffett is another. Then there’s Jim Simons.
Simons has an estimated fortune of 31.8 billion dollars, equivalent to 345 billion kroner, according to Bloomberg’s billionaire index.
The interest in numbers was even shown before the investments:
In 1964, he got a part-time job as a code breaker in the US security service NSA. He was indeed fired in 1967, after having criticized the United States’ participation in the Vietnam War in writing.
He also ran the Simons Foundation, “where he has given billions of dollars to hundreds of philanthropic causes,” the press release said Friday.
He was active in the foundation until his death.
– Jim was an exceptional leader who did transformative work in mathematics and developed a world-leading investment company, says Simons Foundation President David Spergel in the message.
