1/Today in @bopinion, I talk about the legacy and career of Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who is stepping down as the hedge fund's

2/Simons' fund beat the market -- consistently, by huge percentages, after fees.

That's an astonishing accomplishment.

https://t.co/uopG6WutzU
3/How did he do it?

Basically, by being relentlessly smarter and better-managed than the competition.

https://t.co/p6ZTd7POfQ
4/So does Simons' success mean markets are inefficient?

Yes and no.

Obviously yes, since Renaissance could (and can) beat the market. But there are a few key caveats...
5/First of all, RenTech's most eye-popping and consistent returns are in its flagship Medallion Fund.

But most investors can't invest in that fund. It doesn't take your money.

https://t.co/sTXUzl09Lc
6/In fact, the Medallion Fund doesn't even take *its own* money. It makes regular profit distributions, so that the fund's total size remains small -- around $10 billion or so.

https://t.co/bhqE71eSdH
7/This means that the Medallion Fund's famous 39% annualized return (after fees) doesn't compound.

If it did, Medallion would be worth far more than all the rest of the hedge funds in the world combined, by now!
8/So a fund like Medallion isn't really comparable to, say, the return of the S&P. One compounds, the other does not.

Why? Because the market inefficiencies Medallion exploits are limited in size. And thus, Medallion's profit opportunities are limited in size.
9/To address this, Renaissance made a bunch of other funds that do different things than Medallion, and whose strategies scale up more. These have done generally well, but they're no Medallion...

https://t.co/ZsXQ4NNUI8
10/Even as Medallion racked up huge gains in 2020, Renaissance's other funds largely tanked.

This shows that consistently beating the market AT SCALE is incredibly hard, even for the smartest and best-managed people on the planet.

https://t.co/oowJd3k8GH
11/That's no knock against Renaissance, of course. They're the best in the biz.

But it does mean that Renaissance's existence doesn't prove that stock markets are inefficient. Indeed it shows us just how not-so-hugely-inefficient they are!

(end)

https://t.co/uopG6WutzU

More from Noahtogolpe 🐇

This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.


My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl

If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.

In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir

But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...

Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.

Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.

has written about this problem:
Time for panel #3: Big Tech and regulation!

I will be live-tweeting again, and you can also watch video at either the Twitter or Facebook links below!


Kaissar: Every industry gets regulated when it gets big. The question is what kind of regulation Big Tech will get,and whether the companies will be proactive in shaping it.

Kaissar: More profitable companies have higher returns. Why? Maybe it's a risk factor, because more profit = higher risk of getting regulated.

Bershidskyis showing a diagram of GDPR complaince pop-ups. What a massive ill-conceived bureaucratic mess.

Ritholtz: It's 2018 and we're still talking about Facebook privacy settings?! If you're still giving your personal data to Facebook, you just don't care about privacy!
1/I'm thinking about the end of Apu in the context of the national debates on immigration and diversity.


2/Apu's presence in Springfield represented a basic reality of America in the late 20th and early 21st century: the presence of nonwhite immigrants.

3/As Tomas Jimenez writes in "The Other Side of Assimilation", for my generation, immigrants from India, China, Mexico, and many other countries aren't strange or foreign. On the contrary, they're a

4/But that America I grew up with is fundamentally ephemeral. The kids of immigrants don't retain their parents' culture. They merge into the local culture (and, as Jimenez documents, the local culture changes to reflect their influence).

5/Simpsons character don't change. But real people, and real communities, do. So a character who once represented the diversity that immigrants brought to American towns now represents a stereotype of Indian-Americans as "permanent foreigners".

More from Government

They shouldn't be.

The pattern is:
GOP in power - GOP dictates policy

Dems in power - GOP dictates policy


The Dems shouldn't legislate toward the GOP.

The GOP doesn't represent its constituents.

The GOP can push it's agenda on its own time.

If Dems push an agenda that actually helps people, it'll also actually help the GOP constituency.

The GOP won't. So give them nothing.

The Dems should ignore the GOP just like the GOP ignores the Dems.

Make them pay for every moment of obstruction.

Just a hard press on legislation that is unassailable and shine a light on the GOP.

Constant. Relentless. Unyielding.

Shut them out and shut them down.

The GOP is not a legitimate political party. It is an anti-democratic, fascist criminal syndicate with no interest whatsoever in governance.

Nobody should give them the slightest bit of credit or legitimacy ever again.

Not a fucking ounce.

Nobody should engage them in legitimate debate in Congress.

They should be pariahs and treated as unserious occupants of Congress.

Because these people were totally ok with their colleagues being killed in furtherance of the destruction of the insitution.

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