The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

A gripping biography of investment game changer Jim Simons arrives from journalist Zuckerman (The Greatest Trade Ever). With little experience in business before he started trading at age 40, Simons made for an unlikely innovator. Nonetheless, this book reveals, Simons created the “greatest money-making machine in financial history” with his company, Renaissance Technologies, founded in 1982, and particularly with the firm’s flagship Medallion hedge fund, founded in 1988. Showing a flair for the surprising and dramatic statement, Zuckerman proposes that Simons eclipses the more famous likes of Warren Buffett and George Soros as “arguably the most successful trader in the history of modern finance,” with a net worth of about $23 billion. A theoretical mathematician and former math professor, he was the first to take a mathematical, data-driven approach to investing. Gambling that computers using predictive mathematical models could beat human judgment, he won, and changed the industry. Zuckerman skillfully recounts Simons’s backstory—his comfortable childhood in Newton, Mass.; his time spent crafting code-breaking algorithms for the National Security Agency during the 1960s—the salient details of his revolutionary work, and his failures as well as his successes. With a potential recession looming, readers looking to understand how the economy got where it is should eat this up.[em] (Nov.) [/em]