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.
