I don't know what that "in economics" condition is there for. I expect there are plenty of economics professors doing very nicely in the stock market, but it t

I don't know what that "in economics" condition is there for. I expect there are plenty of economics professors doing very nicely in the stock market, but it tends to be mathematicians and physicists who found hedge funds. Successful academics who have done that and made shedloads of money in the stock market would include, er, Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, the very firm under discussion in this thread. The thing that got acquired by Renaissance and turned into the Medallion Fund was called Axcom. That was founded by a guy called James Ax, who before he founded that was ... a mathematics professor at Cornell, Harvard, and Stony Brook. Another key guy at Axcom was Elwyn Berlekamp. He was a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley. So it doesn't seem like there's any incompatibility between being an academic and being very, very good at extracting money from the stock market.