How Jim Simons Built a Machine That Beat the Market

Jim Simons loved cigarettes and math. He started out as an academic mathematician and a Cold War code breaker - but decided to use his skills to write computer programs to spot investment opportunities in the financial markets.

Simons and his fierce nerds bought up all the data sets they could find - reports, books, magnetic tapes - and built machine learning algorithms to hunt for tiny market discrepancies they could exploit. The investment funds Simons started made extraordinary profits - so is this the end for human emotions in financial trading?

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