NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BUSINESS BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT AND MCKINSEY
BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019 'Reads more like a delicious page-turning novel...Put it
on your holiday gift list for your favourite hedge-fund honcho' Bloomberg 'A compelling read'
Economist 'Captivating' New York Times book review Jim Simons is the greatest moneymaker in
modern financial history. His record bests those of legendary investors including Warren
Buffett George Soros and Ray Dalio. Yet Simons and his strategies are shrouded in mystery. The
financial industry has long craved a look inside Simons's secretive hedge fund Renaissance
Technologies and veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman delivers the goods.
After a legendary career as a mathematician and a stint breaking Soviet codes Simons set out
to conquer financial markets with a radical approach. Simons hired physicists mathematicians
and computer scientists - most of whom knew little about finance - to amass piles of data and
build algorithms hunting for the deeply hidden patterns in global markets. Experts scoffed but
Simons and his colleagues became some of the richest in the world their strategy of creating
mathematical models and crunching data embraced by almost every industry today. As Renaissance
became a major player in the financial world its executives began exerting influence on other
areas. Simons became a major force in scientific research education and Democratic politics
funding Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign. While senior executive Robert Mercer is more
responsible than anyone else for the Trump presidency - he placed Steve Bannon in the campaign
funded Trump's victorious 2016 effort and backed alt-right publication Breitbart. Mercer also
impacted the success of the Brexit campaign as he made significant investments in Cambridge
Anatlytica. For all his prescience Simons failed to anticipate how Mercer's activity would
impact his firm and the world. In this fast-paced narrative Zuckerman examines how Simons
launched a quantitative revolution on Wall Street and reveals the impact that Simons the
quiet billionaire king of the quants has had on worlds well beyond finance.
