66% Returns for 30 Years! Jim Simons, The World’s Most Successful Investor

Few investors have profoundly reshaped the financial landscape as Jim Simons. A mathematician turned hedge fund manager; Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, the storied quantitative hedge fund whose flagship Medallion Fund has generated returns that would make even the most seasoned investor blush. With an average annual gain of 66% before fees over three decades, Medallion is less a fund and more a machine of wealth creation, unrivaled in its precision and consistency.

Simons was not a financier by training but a geometer with a taste for solving puzzles. Born in 1938, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, at just 23. His academic career was marked by brilliance, co-developing the Chern-Simons form, a cornerstone in differential geometry with far-reaching implications for theoretical physics. That same knack for decoding complex patterns would propel him to financial superstardom.

Before Wall Street, Simons worked in cryptography for the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. There, he honed his talent for analyzing and decrypting data, a skill he would later weaponize in the world of finance.

When Simons founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982, the firm was a radical experiment. Eschewing traditional Wall…