The Man Who Solved the Market - Gregory Zuckerman

The Man Who Solved the Market

By Gregory Zuckerman

  • Release Date: 2019-11-05
  • Genre: Finance
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 263 Ratings

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

The unbelievable story of a secretive mathematician who pioneered the era of the algorithm--and made $23 billion doing it.


Jim Simons is the greatest money maker in modern financial history. No other investor--Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Ray Dalio, Steve Cohen, or George Soros--can touch his record. Since 1988, Renaissance's signature Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent. The firm has earned profits of more than $100 billion; Simons is worth twenty-three billion dollars.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Simons and dozens of current and former employees, Zuckerman, a veteran Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, tells the gripping story of how a world-class mathematician and former code breaker mastered the market. Simons pioneered a data-driven, algorithmic approach that's sweeping the world.

As Renaissance became a market force, its executives began influencing the world beyond finance. Simons became a major figure in scientific research, education, and liberal politics. Senior executive Robert Mercer is more responsible than anyone else for the Trump presidency, placing Steve Bannon in the campaign and funding Trump's victorious 2016 effort. Mercer also impacted the campaign behind Brexit.

The Man Who Solved the Market is a portrait of a modern-day Midas who remade markets in his own image, but failed to anticipate how his success would impact his firm and his country. It's also a story of what Simons's revolution means for the rest of us.

Reviews

  • Great history of Jim Simons, Sad hatchet job of Bob Mercer

    4
    By SummitView66
    Good overview and history of Jim Simons and creation of RenTech. Sadly, author seemed unable to remove his personal political lens and tries to portray Bob Mercer as a political crackpot with alt-right beliefs. Clearly the author embraces all political views as long as they are aligned with his own (you know the type). So, a truly brilliant, wise and kind-hearted man like Bob Mercer is clearly suspect in this authors mind because of his traditional, conservative (and constitutional) views — which are clearly unfathomable to the author, and repeatedly cast as suspect and damaging. This would have been an otherwise good read except for its unwarranted attempt as a hit piece on the Mercers.
  • ONLY OK

    3
    By madaboutmadmen
    A famed hedge fund needs a better book. This story doesn’t really tell us much about the hedge fund and it’s strategies and goes off tangent with its political focus at the end. Eh.....

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