If there is doubt that the $1.5 trillion hedge fund business is much more than a sophisticated number's game, a new earnings survey of top hedge fund managers should put it to rest.
James Simons, a former MIT pure-maths researcher and ex-Defence Department code breaker, comes in as the highest paid fund manager by a clear $300m. In 2006, his paycheck from Renaissance Technologies Corporation, the firm he founded in 1982, was $1.7bn on assets under management in excess of $4bn.
In this game wealth itself seems barely relevant. Simons, 69, maintains that what interests him is mathematics. At his office in the small seaside town of East Setauket on New York's Long Island, more than half his 140 employees are phDs in mathematics, physics, astrophysics or statistics. Simons rarely hires from Wall Street - not |
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It’s no coincidence that the top hedge fund earner is a mathematician, says edward helmore |
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brainy enough - and potential new hires must address the firm on their area of scholarship. The firm uses complex algorithms to analyse financial data to predict price changes in stocks, bonds and commodities.
It is a measure, perhaps, of how uninteresting the accumulation of such massive wealth becomes that Simons, whose maths achievements came in the field of differential geometry, is a prominent philanthropist to the sciences. He recently gave $130m for research into the genetics of autism; a smaller sum to keep a heavy ion collider operational. Chances are we'll never know much about Simons - he shuns publicity, offering the wisdom of Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm for explanation: "God gave me a tail to keep off the flies. But I'd rather of had no tail and no flies."
FIRST POSTED APRIL 26, 2007
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