The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success

The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge.

It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like, t