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The capital in RenTech's flagship fund is 100% from the employees of Rentech. These guys are managing their own money. So the idea they're screwing customers
by balance_factor 10y ago
The capital in RenTech's flagship fund is 100% from the employees of Rentech. These guys are managing their own money. So the idea they're screwing customers on it is false, they are the customer. I think they have some other funds as well, but not the flagship Medallion fund.
I did IT at a Wall Street investment bank. Jim Simons and these math and CS guys at Ren Tech made a paradise for math and CS people over there. At investment banks you make money for heirs, and as IT are treated like garbage, and their IT and quant operations are garbage at investment banks (relative to hedge funds). Rentech, DE Shaw etc. did quant math, IT infrastructure etc. right and are kicking investment banks ass. Rentech manages employee capital instead of handing it to heirs and underpaying IT and treating IT like shit and having a shitty IT infrastructure like even the top investment banks often do. So these hedge funds are demonized by traditional Wall Street, who are trying to hang some populist halo around the criticism. It would have to be a populist or liberal/soc-dem criticism, because it's certainly not some kind of Marxian criticism. Marx explained how exploitation happened in capitalism, and it's not by a bunch of machine learning gurus managing their own money figuring out how to
trade commodities better than Wall Street investment banks who manage the money of heirs.
- PostOnce 10y agoNice username. I thought all these things because I never heard the other side of the story, now I'm not sure what I think. These guys aren't sitting around by themselves making money in a vacuum, they're also allegedly engaging in illegal and/or unethical financial fuckery, for lack of a better term, and obviously spending money on politicians which may or may not mean anything at all. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/hedge-fund-taxes-superpacs-election-renaissance http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/hedge-fund-taxes... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/hedge-fund-hedges-its-political-bets-rentech-renaissance-technologies http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/hedge-fund-hedge... Before any bias is expressed against motherjones, all I want to say is that these two articles are the only even quasi-critical voices I have seen, which also points out the timing and circumstances that surrounded the publication of the article that enamored me of James Simons: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/science/a-billionaire-mathematicians-life-of-ferocious-curiosity.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/science/a-billionaire-math... Anyway, everything is grey and nothing is black and white. Just wanted to put something on the other side of the scale.
- whatok 10y agoI can only scream bias in the reporting given the title of the article and the fact that Soros is in a picture with Simons and there is no mention of Soros in the article. Unreal.
- PostOnce 10y agoYes, it's very anti-Simons, my point is until now I have heard no criticism of either him or rentech, I just found it interesting to find any criticism at all. He's an interesting guy regardless, video interviews with him are often fascinating... and he named his yacht Archimedes.