The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019 Paperback – 9 Mar. 2023

Excellent well written book. Fascinating description of the building of a quant finance house and the many years of trial and error it took. Based on many interviews with the people directly involved makes it credible with well drawn character portraits. Interesting history of investing / speculating from Babylonian times to present included. It also is a primer for how the various software models are written. Shows inadvertently why billionaires should not be able to use their fabulous wealth to influence politics; being driven by maths and a desire to make money are poor qualifications for considering the greater good. Their years of remarkable profits makes crystal clear the limitations of traditional economic theory based on efficient markets, rational man and random walks.

If you don't realise that financial markets exhibit patterns which can be discovered and exploited for profit - albeit no easy task - Gregory Zuckerman's book offers an insight into this central part of the industry; the bit the financial entertainment media have been misrepresenting for decades. There are no solutions in the pages that will make you money. Not the point, or value of the book and I'd have preferred if "The Man Who Solved the Market"had been left out of the title, though it likely helps sell the book.I didn't know Jim Simons smoked heavily; which will be why his voice resonates the way it does and his laugh is often followed by a cough. And Bob Mercer whistles a lot, maybe more than he talks, and was one of the main financial contributors to the 2016 Trump campaign. And how this connects with Brexit and goodness knows what else is quite eye opening.As with all worthwhile stories the book is about people, and how they relate to each other and their world.What made the Renaissance Medallion Fund work was obviously in part the shrewd harnessing of the various individuals exceptional intellectual abilities, and the exponential growth of computers processing power. Creative and curious minds meet mathematical modelling and data analysis on a massive scale.The real success of the company seems to come from the ability and willingness of a handful of principal players to work together, despite extraordinarily different social, political and personal alliances. Motivated by money, for sure, but the theme that much more was intrinsically involved is a strong thread which I think makes the book a 4 star read. Most pleasing of all was throughout there were no goodies or baddies!

More details than I was expecting, an entertaining page turner that shows Simons was only human. Arguably his biggest talent was in selling the vision and building an incredible team around him.

“The Man Who Solved the Market” provides a captivating inside look at Jim Simons and his groundbreaking approach to quantitative trading. The narrative is engaging, shedding light on how a brilliant mathematician harnessed data to outsmart traditional market players. I found it so intriguing that I own both the paperback and digital versions—definitely worth the read if you’re curious about how math can transform Wall Street.

This isn’t a brilliant book on the face of it, but then again it is written about a famously tight lipped subject on which virtually nothing is known. So you have to credit the author a lot for bringing this subject to fruition even if it is somewhat lacking in detail.The key insight of the book is that Jim Simons and his colleagues realised that markets were not efficient, in contrast to the mainstream view of market efficiency, and that the inefficiency could be exploited for profit. Lots of it. And they were right.So this book is well worth reading. It’s well written and it skips along at a relatively decent pace. I don’t think it’s a five star book on my scale, and I doubt it will quite make the top step in the FT Business Book of the Year, but it is still a book you probably do want to read sometime soon if you work in and around trading financial markets.

Fascinating look into the mind of Jim Simonds. Clearly a mathematical genius himself but the way he assembled a group of geniuses together to create the greatest quant fund of all time is really interesting. The greatest takeaway I got from this book was about the human relationships created by Jim and how no matter how many years of very little success he kept at it and never quit until his funds became wildly successful. Trusting the math seemed to work.