In 1982, 40-year-old retired mathematics professor Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund and staffed it with mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists to pioneer algorithmic trading. Since 1988, Jim Simons' Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund has returned an average of 66% per year and generated over $150 billion in profits from the financial markets.

Jim Simons himself is worth over $23 billion personally, as his share of the profits from his fund. No other trader, investor, or fund is even in the same league for his returns over the past 30 years. His fund has created more wealth than the combined net worth of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

The most amazing thing about Jim Simons' feat of mastering the financial markets is that he never took a finance class, was not interested in business, and hired people from outside Wall Street to work at his hedge fund. His team brought a new perspective to the world of trading by looking at it through the lens of math rather than predictions, egos, or opinions.

Renaissance Technologies specializes in systematic trading using quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses. The Medallion Fund was created in 1988. It began using a more general version of Leonard Baum's mathematical models, which were further improved by the algebraist James Ax. It explored correlations that could be used to create a profit edge. The Medallion Fund was named by Simons and Ax after the math awards that they had both won. The Medallion Fund has the best record of long-term, consistent returns in history, returning over 35% annualized over a 20-year span. From 1994 to mid-2014, it averaged a 71.8% annual return. No one else is even close on long-term returns, not Warren Buffett, not George Soros, or Paul Tudor Jones. Jim Simons is a giant in the land of the tallest traders.

Even after a 5% management fee and a 44% performance fee, which are much higher than the industry standard 2% management and 20% performance fees, the Medallion Fund has generated returns of about 40% per year, net of fees, since inception in 1988.

From the book: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

Jim Simons retired in late 2009. The fund is now managed by Peter Brown, a computer scientist who specializes in computational linguistics, who was hired by Renaissance in 1993 while working at IBM Research. Simons remains a non-executive chairman and still has money in its funds, mostly in the incredibly profitable Medallion black-box strategy. Based on his return performance, Jim Simons is currently the best money manager and trader on earth. Renaissance currently has over $110 billion in assets under management, most of which is capital from the firm's employees.

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