There was a conspiracy theory making the rounds for a bit based on Simons connections to Columbia. He rode a moped down there in the 50s, and I think won a tile

There was a conspiracy theory making the rounds for a bit based on Simons connections to Columbia. He rode a moped down there in the 50s, and I think won a tile or carpet factory in a card game. I don't think anyone but the haters give it any credence, but it shows you what kind of person Simons is besides "smart." I think it's a fair guess that they are just better at playing the game than most. The people I've known from there are all very good, and alums have included people like Lenny Baum (aka hidden Markov Baum-Welch) and Elwyn Berlekamp. They also were almost certainly the first or second (Thorp knew) fund to truly figure out optimal bet sizing via Berlekamp's association with Kelley. Mercer's work in speech recognition at IBM is also evocative; speech recognition has been around for a long time, but it's always been really difficult and inherently a time series problem, like markets. Lots of Mercer's old team got pulled into Rentech looking at different kinds of time series. Tax optimization is just another part of the game. I know a bunch of guys who renounced their US citizenship and moved to Bermuda to run their fund; 36% compounds pretty quickly.