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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (224264)	10/9/2009 2:40:05 PM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

So this guy's 'institutional fund' lost money, but the fund open only to employees has been minting money!!! Regards, John Hedge Firm Says Chief Will Retire By ZACHERY KOUWE Published: October 8, 2009 James H. Simons, one of the most respected money managers in the hedge fund industry, told investors Thursday he planned to step down from day-to-day management of Renaissance Technologies, the firm he founded over 30 years ago. Mr. Simons, 71, plans to become the nonexecutive chairman of Renaissance on Jan. 1 but will remain the firm’s majority shareholder and participate in all major corporate decisions, he said in a letter to investors. Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, who have been co-presidents of the firm, will be elevated to co-chief executives and have responsibility for the firm’s 300 employees. “I have led the organization and its predecessor for 31 years, and it is definitely time to pass the torch,” Mr. Simons said in the letter. A prize-winning mathematician and a former code breaker as a consultant to the Defense Department, Mr. Simons has slowly handed more control of the firm’s operations to Mr. Brown and Mr. Mercer over the last six years to prepare for his eventual departure. Like many hedge funds, Renaissance had performance problems last year in its largest fund, the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund. When the fund was started in 2005, Mr. Simons hoped to eventually raise $100 billion from outside investors, which would have been the industry’s largest on record. Assets in the Institutional Equities Fund peaked at $27 billion in 2007, but have fallen more than 80 percent this year as investors raced to pull their money out. While it lost money last year in the financial crisis, the fund has not been able to pull out of its slump this year, despite the broad rally in the markets. It posted losses of 9.49 percent through Sept. 30, according to investors. That stands in stark contrast to Renaissance’s oldest fund, Medallion, which skyrocketed 80 percent last year and has never had a losing year since it was started in 1988. Instead of M.B.A.’s, the firm employs dozens of computer programmers and Ph.D.’s, who create highly complex models to exploit subtle mispricing in stock, bond and commodities markets. Medallion was closed to outside investors in 1993 and contains money only from the firm’s 300 employees, including Mr. Simons. Mr. Simons is secretive, preferring to speak at mathematics forums rather than attend Wall Street functions. He once told a group of potential investors that “luck is largely responsible for my reputation for genius,” according to an article in Institutional Investor Magazine in 2000. But, even with the Institutional Equities Fund’s losses, many on Wall Street still say they believe that Mr. Simons has an almost supernatural talent for making money. The son of a shoe factory worker from the suburbs of Boston, Mr. Simons was awarded the Veblen Prize, the geometry world’s highest honor, from the American Mathematics Society when he was 38. By 1976, he was trading currencies with his own money and working part time as professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In 1978, he started a private investment fund called Limroy, investing in things like commodities and venture capital. He opened Medallion in 1988 with Henry Laufer, a former Princeton mathematics professor who is still Renaissance’s chief researcher. Mr. Simons’s success has made him a billionaire several times over. Forbes Magazine estimated that he took home $2.8 billion last year. He has put much of that wealth into his family foundation, which supports basic research and graduate education in mathematics and science among other things. After stepping away from running Renaissance, Mr. Simons plan to spend more time overseeing a major project to understand the causes of autism and building a center at Stony Brook University for the research of mathematics and physics. His foundation has also established Math for America, a program to attract and retain knowledgeable math teachers in the nation’s public high schools, with chapters in several cities.