Jim Simons, the mathematician-investor who created what many in finance consider the world’s greatest moneymaking machine at his secretive firm, Renaissance Technologies, has died. He was 86.
He died today in New York City, according to his charitable foundation, which didn’t cite a cause.
In turning from academia to investing as he entered his 40s, Simons eschewed standard practices of money managers in favor of quantitative analysis — finding patterns in data that predicted price changes. His technique was so successful that he became known as the Quant King.
At Renaissance, located about 60 miles east of Manhattan in quiet East Setauket, New York, Simons avoided employing Wall Street veterans. Instead he sought out mathematicians and scientists, including astrophysicists and code breakers, who could ferret out usable investment information in the terabytes of data his firm sucked in each day on everything from sunspots to overseas weather.
Over more than three decades, his returns consistently trounced markets even as computer power got cheaper and competitors tried their best to mimic Renaissance’s success by building their own complex algorithms to run their funds.
“There are just a few individuals who have truly changed how we view the markets,” Theodore Aronson, founder of AJO Vista, a quantitative money management firm, told Bloomberg Markets magazine in 2008. “John Maynard Keynes is one of the few. Warren Buffett is one of the few. So is Jim Simons.”
A onetime code breaker for the US government, Simons refused to give specifics about how he produced more than four times the return of the S&P 500 Index in his most famous fund, Medallion. From 1988 through 2023, the fund generated an astounding average annual return of almost 40%, even after hefty fees, turning Simons and as many as three colleagues into billionaires.
He was worth an estimated $31.8 billion, making him the 49th-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Clients and insiders paid handsomely to entrust their funds to Simons. He eventually raised fees to 5% of assets and 44% of profits, among the industry’s highest. Believing that the algorithms the firm used to trade stocks, bonds and commodities wouldn’t work if Medallion got too large, he soon started limiting access to the fund.
In 1993, Simons stopped accepting new money from Medallion clients, and in 2005, he kicked out outsiders entirely, allowing only employees to invest. He returned profits every year, limiting the size of the fund to around $10 billion.
He opened more pedestrian funds for the general public. At times, the disparity in their performance was dramatic. In 2020, the Medallion fund gained 76% while the public funds racked up double-digit losses.
Company Trips
Simons’ talents extended to knowing how to inspire his often quirky employees — 300 in all — who came to Renaissance. The complicated problem of figuring out why markets rise and fall was one draw, as was the high pay and the sense of community he created.
“It’s an open atmosphere,” Simons said in a rare speech in 2010 at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing, the sooner the better. That’s what stimulates people.”
He played the benevolent father figure, organizing company trips to Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, Florida and Vermont — and encouraged employees to bring their families.
Company lore is that on one of the firm’s ski trips, Simons, a lifetime smoker, bought an insurance policy for a local restaurant so he wouldn’t have to forgo his beloved Merits.
Many competitors tried and failed to replicate the Medallion fund’s secret sauce. After Bernard Madoff’s money-making success was exposed as a Ponzi scheme in 2008, the US Securities and Exchange Commission came calling at Renaissance, Simons said at another MIT gathering in 2019.
“They did study us,” he said. “Of course, they didn’t find anything.”
Political Divide
Simons stepped down as chief executive officer in 2010 and as chairman in 2021. Two of his key early hires — Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, mathematicians and pioneers in speech recognition and machine translation who were lured away from IBM’s renowned Thomas J. Watson Research Center — replaced him as co-CEOs.
The money-making prowess of Renaissance made it a honey pot for politicians from both major political parties.
Simons and his wife, Marilyn, were leading donors to the Democratic Party, giving more than $109 million to candidates — including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — and supporting committees since 2015, according to OpenSecrets.
One of Simons’ first hires, Henry Laufer, a fellow multibillionaire, also became a major supporter to Democratic committee and causes. But Mercer, along with his daughter Rebekah, became major contributors to the Republican Party, in particular to Donald Trump in 2016.
Around 2020, Renaissance expanded the group of directors who would eventually succeed Simons in overseeing the firm and promoted his son, Nathaniel Simons, to co-chairman, a move positioning him to eventually take over.
Math Whiz
James Harris Simons was born on April 25, 1938, in the Boston suburb of Brookline, the only child of Matthew Simons and the former Marcia Kantor. His father worked in the film industry as a New England sales representative for 20th Century Fox. Later he helped manage his father-in-law’s shoe factory.
Precocious at math from age 3, Simons completed Newton High School in three years. He became a bar mitzvah at 13 but said he had little interest in Judaism after that.
At MIT, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1958 after just three years of study. While pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, he got his first taste of investing, driving to a Merrill Lynch brokerage in San Francisco to trade soybean futures. He also married his first wife, the former Barbara Bluestein, with whom he would have three children: Nathaniel, Liz and Paul, who died in a bicycling accident in 1996.
That marriage ended in divorce. With his second wife, the former Marilyn Hawrys, he had two children — Nick, who died in a swimming accident in 2003, and Audrey.
Simons returned to MIT in 1961 to begin his teaching career, sensing that his future path was decided. “I remember sitting in the library one day, saying, ‘Well, I guess I’ll become an assistant professor and then an associate professor and then a professor and then I’ll go through life that way and then die,’” he recalled in a 2020 oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics. “And it made me think maybe there are other things in the world.”
Cold War Code-Breaking
In 1964, after teaching at Harvard University, Simons moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to take a high-paying and highly classified job at the Institute for Defense Analyses. The nonprofit research organization was hiring mathematicians to support the US National Security Agency in cracking codes and ciphers used by the Soviet Union.
The work introduced Simons to the possibilities in creating algorithms for computers. IDA employees were permitted to spend half their time on personal work, and Simons devoted some of his to predicting short-term moves in the stock market.
Simons worked there for more than three years before losing his job for publicly challenging the IDA’s president, Army General Maxwell D. Taylor, over the war in Vietnam.
In a piece for the New York Times Magazine, Taylor had insisted that the US was winning a war worth fighting. Simons, responding with a letter to the editor, spelled out his belief that “any political gains stemming from a military victory cannot possibly be offset by the enormous economic, intellectual and moral investment which we are continuing to place in this venture.”
Simons was hired to chair the math department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. With Shiing-Shen Chern, he created the Chern–Simons theory, presented in a 1974 paper. The theory provides the tools, known as invariants, that mathematicians use to distinguish among certain curved spaces — the kinds of distortions of ordinary space that exist according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
In 1976, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the American Mathematical Society.
Traded Commodities
While chairing the math department, and using the connections he had made through his work in cryptography, Simons dabbled once again in trading.
Initially he bought and sold commodities, making his bets based on fundamentals such as supply and demand. He found the experience gut-wrenching, so he turned to his network of cryptographers and mathematicians for help looking at patterns: Elwyn Berlekamp and Leonard Baum, former colleagues from IDA, plus Laufer and James Ax, a mathematician whom he had personally recruited to leave Cornell University and join the Stony Brook faculty.
“Maybe there were some ways to predict prices statistically,” Simons said in a 2015 interview with Numberphile. “Gradually we built models.”
In 1978 he left academia for good to try his hand at managing money.
He founded Monemetrics, a precursor to Renaissance, in Setauket, just east of Stony Brook. He turned to an old friend and fellow code cracker from the IDA, Leonard Baum, whose mathematical models could be used to trade currencies. He brought in Ax, his former Stony Brook colleague, to oversee Baum’s work.
Ax concluded that the models worked not only with the currencies Baum had written them for, but for any commodity future. Simons set up Ax with his own trading account, Axcom Ltd., which eventually gave birth to Medallion.
Medallion’s first two years were mixed, but in 1990, after focusing exclusively on shorter-term trading, Medallion chalked up a 56% return, net of fees, and performance never faltered after that.
Simons pledged to donate the majority of his wealth to charities. The New York-based Simons Foundation, founded with Marilyn in 1994, supports research in mathematics, science and autism. Simons also founded Math for America, which extends fellowships to math and science teachers in New York City public schools. Last year he donated $500 million to Stony Brook University’s endowment, one of the largest gifts to higher education in US history.
Of his own transition from science to finance, Simons once observed, “One can predict the course of a comet more easily than one can predict the course of Citigroup’s stock. The attractiveness, of course, is that you can make more money successfully predicting a stock than you can a comet.”
A foreign limited liability company with ties to a Qatari businessman is looking to turn a vacant Gilded Age mansion on the Upper East Side into a private members-only club, records show.
The applicant, Celtic New York, is requesting permission from the city to renovate the landmarked, Beaux Arts-style townhouse at 854 Fifth Ave. "in order to give it new life as a private members' club with three guestrooms that will allow transient occupancy."
Under the anodyne name 854 Fifth Acquisition, the applicant purchased the 6-story, roughly 16,000-square-foot structure in 2022 for $50 million in an all-cash deal from the five heads of the former Yugoslavia — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia and Slovenia, records show.
The New York Post reported at the time that the anonymous buyer was a foreign national based in London who owns property around the world. That jibes with the life of 44-year-old Abdulhadi Al-Hajri, who has been linked to splashy real estate transactions in the past, such as the Ritz in London, and has ties to prominent and controversial political figures around the globe. Al-Hajri was listed on the application as an individual owner who controls at least 10% of Celtic New York. The Department of City Planning subsequently took down this documentation, telling Crain's it was "mistakenly uploaded" and removed because it contained personal information.
According to various reports, Al-Hajri is the brother-in-law of Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, who is considered one of the most powerful people in the country and has control of the Qatar Armed Forces. Al-Hajri is also reportedly friendly with the former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, who was jailed last year for a range of charges, including for exposing secret government documents, terrorism and inciting violence.
United Kingdom-based firm Thornham Residential Holdings is listed as the representative for the client, Celtic New York, whose only point of contact is the law firm on file, New York-based DLA Piper — the same firm whose partner, Chris Smith, represented the anonymous buyer of the Fifth Avenue mansion two years ago, records show. Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Simon Nurney, who serves as director of Thornham Residential Holdings, also did not return a request for comment by press time.
The property, which is apparently equipped with bullet-proof windows and Cold War-era spy gear, has a history of connections to international figures. It once hid Josip Broz Tito, the late-president of the former Yugoslavia, during an assassination attempt in 1963, the Post reported.
Erected in 1903, the mansion sits within the Upper East Side Historic District and became one of the city's first individually designated landmarks in 1969. Designed by Warren and Wetmore, the same architects behind the New York Yacht Club and Grand Central Terminal, the building was damaged in a 2018 fire. According to the application, Celtic is also looking to restore both its exterior and interior. Peter Pennoyer Architect is the architect of record.
Land-use attorney Valerie Campbell, a partner at New York-based law firm Kramer Levin, who is representing the applicant before the city, declined to comment.
A project spokeswoman declined to provide more details about its purpose and said only in a statement to Crain's that they are in the "early stages of an exciting project that aims to fully restore one of New York's last remaining Gilded Age buildings to its architectural and historical splendor."
Leases
Digital media firm heads downtown
Address: 107 Greenwich St., Manhattan
Landlord: Trinity Church Wall Street
Tenant: Puck
Lease size: 10,108 square feet
Asking rent: $79 per square foot
Asset type: Office
Brokers: A JLL team led by John Wheeler, Andrew Coe and Margaux Kelleher represented the landlord. An LSL Advisors team including Eric Siegel, Daniel Lolai and Raphael Zar represented the tenant.
Sales
Eis unloads 8-building rental portfolio in the East Village
Addresses: 58 Second Ave., 60-62 Second Ave. and 110 E. First St., Manhattan
Seller: Leonard Eis
Buyer: Alfred Sabetfard
Sale price: $18 million
Asset type: Mixed use
Brokers: Avison Young’s Brandon Polakoff and Ryan McGuirl represented the seller.
Addresses: 105, 107 and 109 First Ave., Manhattan
Seller: Leonard Eis
Buyer: Lawrence Movtady
Sale price: $13.75 million
Asset type: Mixed use
Brokers: Avison Young’s Brandon Polakoff and Ryan McGuirl represented the seller.
Addresses: 425 and 543 E. Sixth St., Manhattan
Seller: Leonard Eis
Buyer: Son Dinh Tran
Sale price: $6.25 million
Asset type: Mixed use
Brokers: Avison Young’s Brandon Polakoff and Ryan McGuirl represented the seller.
Financings
New Knickerbocker Village owner obtains acquisition loan
Address: 10-20 Monroe St., Manhattan
Owner: L+M Fund Management
Lender: Wells Fargo
Loan amount: $90 million
Asset type: Multifamily
Read more about the deal here.
A developer has decided to say farewell to a landmarked post office that has been the focus of dreams about the turnaround of the South Bronx.
Chelsea-based Youngwoo & Associates, which helped transform a dilapidated Manhattan cargo warehouse into the food hall complex Pier 57, has listed 558 Grand Concourse for about $75 million.
In 2014 Youngwoo paid $19 million for the 4-story, 175,000-square-foot government property, public records show. Afterward it invested $40 million to renovate the upper floors of the full-block, Art Deco site, which besides housing a small postal facility is also home to Zona de Cuba, a five-year-old Cuban restaurant.
“While development plans are to be unveiled at a future date, [Youngwoo] intends to build upon the property’s legacy as a trophy of the Bronx and an iconic gateway to the borough,” said a statement from the developer from around when it bought the property, a major bet on the area at the time. A food hall was once considered for the property, which is at East 149th Street.
With the revival of the area in full swing, the brokers now marketing the property expect the eye-catching edifice to attract a single occupant, which would presumably use it for classrooms, offices or as a medical facility, though the existing leases would transfer with it.
“The area has gotten tremendously better in the last decade,” said James Nelson, the Avison Young broker handling the sale. “And this is not just some old warehouse.”
Nelson added that since Youngwoo purchased the property, which was accomplished with the help of a $12.4 million loan from Cathay Bank, the South Bronx has become awash with residential development. Indeed, developers have added 62,000 new homes in the past decade, he said, and nearly 17,000 are planned, he pointed out.
The 1935 granite-and-marble Bronx Central Annex, whose facade features tall, arched windows and two mounted statues, received local landmark status for its exterior in 1976.
“The elegant simplicity of the building with its finely executed details make[s] it one of the best examples of government architecture in this style,” says the official report compiled for the designation. “It met a long-felt need in the Bronx when built, and continues to serve that function today.”
In 2013 city officials also conferred landmark status on a portion of the inside of the building, a rarity. A series of 13 Great Depression-era murals called “Resources of America,” depicting scenes of workers harvesting wheat and firing furnaces, that was painted by the husband-and-wife team of Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn grace the space.
No. 558 offers 169,000 square feet inside and 4,400 square feet outside, across several terraces, plus 39 parking spaces, its listing shows. The post office leases about 10,000 square feet, and Zona de Cuba occupies 15,000, Nelson added. The terms of those leases was not immediately clear.
Bryan Woo, an executive at Youngwoo, a firm founded in 1979 by his father Young Woo, declined to comment. In addition to Pier 57, Youngwoo served as a developer of 200 11th Ave., a West Chelsea high-rise condo whose apartments come with adjacent garages for cars.
The luxurious Italian wellness spa on Governors Island, QC New York, is gearing up for a major expansion this summer. QC NY on Thursday announced plans to open a 15,000-square-foot addition in July, featuring sensory saunas, waterfalls, a salt room, a lavender room, an ice room, a relaxation room with waterbeds, and a 142-seat restaurant. [...]
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Blackstone has sold off a major portfolio of industrial properties in Queens and New Jersey to San Francisco-based real estate firm Terreno for $246 million.
Terreno announced earlier this month that it had purchased an industrial portfolio in the city, New Jersey, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area for about $365 million, but the firm did not identify the seller. The portfolio consists of 28 buildings spanning about 1.2 million square feet that is 91.6% leased to 70 tenants.
The Queens properties consist of 21 parcels near John F. Kennedy International Airport. Blackstone had acquired the parcels in 2019 for about $130 million.
"Logistics has been a high-conviction theme for us for well over a decade, and this transaction illustrates the continued strength we see today," David Levine, co-head of Americas acquisitions for Blackstone, said in a statement.
A representative for Terreno declined to comment.
Blackstone bet particularly heavily on industrial real estate in 2019, most notably through an $18.7 billion purchase of warehouses across the country from Singapore-based firm GLP Pte. But Blackstone has more recently inked multiple deals to sell parts of its industrial portfolio, including a $3.1 billion sale to Prologis last year, and placed a huge bet on multifamily properties, striking a deal to purchase apartment landlord AIR Communities for roughly $10 billion earlier this year.
The firm is still a big believer in the industrial sector "as illustrated by our $175 billion global logistics portfolio," Levine said.
Industrial real estate in the city did very well during the pandemic, although growth from the logistics and e-commerce firms that helped it stay strong slowed during the second half of last year. However, the sector got off to a strong start in 2024, with the outer boroughs seeing their busiest first quarter since 2019, thanks in part to demand from wholesale firms and studios, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
On the heels of Second Chance Month and entering National Small Business Week, it is a time to reflect as a state and raise awareness on the importance of second chance opportunities for people returning to their communities from incarceration. As a business owner, a New Yorker, and someone who has been incarcerated, I am a living testament to the value of meaningful second chances. The mistakes I made as a young person did not define me, because there were opportunities for me to succeed and contribute to my community.
Since my own release, I’ve become a proud community member of the city and the owner of a thriving business that’s all about second chances. At Untapped Solutions, we connect justice-impacted individuals and other folks from marginalized communities to employers and job opportunities, harnessing the potential of traditionally untapped talents to create more diverse, dynamic, and stronger workplaces. Connecting people to quality jobs drives economic growth, reduces recidivism, and promotes social equity by providing meaningful employment opportunities to talented individuals who want to work and take care of their families.
And I see the opportunity for so many more businesses and our communities overall to benefit from the contributions of formerly incarcerated people if we can pass commonsense sentencing reform this year. New York has not passed meaningful sentencing reform in more than 15 years. Long prison sentences keep people away from their families and locked out of the workforce, without improving public safety. While other states – including Oklahoma and Texas – have passed laws expanding opportunities to reconsider or earn time off sentences, New York has fallen behind. At the same time, many businesses are struggling to hire qualified candidates amidst a persisting workforce shortage.
New York’s elected leaders have the opportunity to address both of these problems by passing a package of sentencing reforms, including the Earned Time Act (S774/A1128) and the Second Look Act (S321/A531), and the Marvin Mayfield Act (SS6471A/A2036B). Advancing these policies will help us strengthen our state’s workforce without compromising public safety.
The Earned Time Act would allow people to earn more time off their sentences for participation in educational and vocational programs that provide them with skills to be ready to rejoin the workforce upon release. The Second Look Act would allow judges to review extremely long sentences to see if a person’s demonstrated rehabilitation means they should be given a reduced sentence, recognizing that people should be given a second chance and that long sentences don’t make us safer.
Every day, I see how supporting justice-impacted people is better for our community as a whole. Employers who utilize Untapped Solutions often tell us how impressed they are with the commitment and work ethic of the employees they find through our platform. Given the right tools and opportunities, formerly incarcerated individuals want to and can thrive in the workforce.
Unfortunately, the longer someone stays behind bars, the more they can fall behind modern technology and the job market. Every year locked away makes it exponentially more difficult to reintegrate into the workforce. With these sentencing reforms that can reduce recidivism and increase job skills, we can make impactful change.
Passing sentencing reform will bring valuable community members back to the workforce and continue to prioritize public safety. Business leaders across the state see the value of second chances. Now, it’s up to New York lawmakers to pass these data-backed sentencing reforms to provide meaningful second chances, strengthen our workforce, and make our communities safer.
Andre Peart is the CEO and Founder of Untapped Solutions, a technology company that empowers employers to connect with and hire talent from underserved communities.
The city is looking to build hundreds of free, secure bike parking locations across the five boroughs to prevent theft and encourage more New Yorkers to bike. The Department of Transportation on Thursday issued a request for proposals seeking operators for a network of 500 secure biking parking facilities to be built starting next year. [...]
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