About 15 years ago, Jim Simons was driving to Boston to give a speech at his alma mater, MIT. He had retired a year before. He was 72 years old.
He was, at the time, the most successful hedge fund manager of all time.
His wife was with him, and she asked if he was going to mention the guiding values that made him successful.
At first, he thought, “I don’t know that I have any.”
Upon reflection, he wrote down five principles that are as pithy as they are profound.
-Don’t Run with The Pack
-Hire the Smartest People
-Don’t Give Up Easily
-Be Guided by Beauty
-Hope For Good Luck!
Simons arrived at his list organically after building his business. It doesn’t feel artificial. It’s not derived from some acronym. It reflects what worked for him over the course of a remarkable life.
Simons died yesterday at the age of 86. His career consisted of following one passion to the next. It wasn’t a succession of five-year plans. It was ten-year building blocks stacked one on the other.
After Simons graduated with his PhD, he worked as a code breaker for the government during the Cold War. He was fired for publicly voicing opposition to the Vietnam War. Next, he spent a decade running the math department at Stony Brook University.
At about 40, his life took a serious left turn. Simmons became so interested in markets and convinced he could build a better system that he quit his prestigious, steady job to trade stocks in an office over a strip mall.
DON’T RUN WITH THE PACK
Having never worked in the financial industry, he proceeded to hire a group of physicists and astronomers to build something new, a quant trading firm.
HIRE THE SMARTEST PEOPLE
He spent 10 years building a trading platform based on data that didn’t work that well until all of a sudden it did. It became a flywheel that minted money.
DON’T GIVE UP EASILY
He built the most successful financial firm in history without hiring anyone from Wall Street. He regarded doing something really well, whether it’s a mathematical equation or managing a business, as a form of art.
BE GUIDED BY BEAUTY
The Medallion Fund, launched in 1988, went on to return 66% a year and generate more than $100 billion in trading profits.
HOPE FOR GOOD LUCK
Simon’s professional life roughly broke down like this:
–10 years getting a PhD and working as a cryptologist and doing math.
–10 years heading the math department at Stony Brook University
–10 years struggling to build a trading algorithm
–10 years minting money from the trading algorithm
–10 years running a foundation to fund basic science
–10 years being “retired”.
He was never celebrity famous like Warren Buffet. He didn’t tweet principles like Ray Dalio. He didn’t buy a sports team like Steve Cohen. He was well known for his habit of not wearing socks and chain-smoking cigarettes.
Simons rarely gave interviews. There are perhaps a dozen videos of him on the Internet from the past two decades. They are all worth watching.
One is a 90-minute chalkboard presentation of a complex geometry problem he solved called the Chern-Simons theory.
It will disabuse you of any illusion that you could have done what he did.
Click here to watch: https://t.co/scsNiNn93z
Simons’ success lay in combining his mathematical prowess and insights with a passion to build and inspire teams of people.
In the MIT speech, he lays out his recipe: “Great people. Great infrastructure. Open environment. Get everyone compensated roughly based on the overall performance… That made a lot of money.”
Gregory Zuckerman wrote the definitive book on Simons called The Man Who Solved the Market.
Simons didn’t want it written.
Later, he said its “pretty good.”
Ironically, it probably did more than anything to cement his reputation as the world’s best performing hedge fund manager.
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Naval has a line I really like,
“Escape competition through authenticity.”
There is only one you, and by showing up as yourself; a 1 of 1 … you powerfully wield an extreme competitive advantage. To the point of escaping competition altogether.