Oh yeah, RenTech is just fascinating, and the opacity only lends to the mystique around it. People are talking a lot about how hard it is to get a gig at Jane, and AFAIK it's fucking hard, but one of the best mathematicians who was also a super-hacker I've ever met crushed the Jane interview and got bounced out in the RenTech screen.

Of course, the 30%+ annual returns almost every year for 30 years doesn't hurt the mystique either ;)

It's interesting that their other funds are far more mundane in terms of performance and last I heard Medallion can't hold much capital (~10B or so I've heard in whispers), but there is definitely something interesting as hell going on there.

Near as I can tell it's the hardest job to get on Earth. Rumor mill is that they pre-screen candidate based on their citation record in the literature, though that's obviously hearsay and I don't know if it's true.

Had "The Man Who Solved The Market: How Jim Simons Launched The Quant Revolution" on my shelf for several years as an out-of-the-blue birthday present but I finally got around to reading it earlier this year and I'd absolutely recommend it.

The emphasis on published work rang a bell, but thumbing through the book I can't find it off hand.

I enthusiastically second "The Man Who Solved The Market".

I also enjoyed the book and tried to find out more which I wrote about here (in my non-monetized blog): https://sileret.com/blog/renaissance_technologies/

In addition to RenTech, TGS is another intriguing place that mostly flies under the radar and from all rumors seems to have been fantastically successful over 3 decades. It’d be very interesting to hear about other less known firms with stellar, albeit likely smaller in absolute terms, levels of success.

TGS is just weird. Friend of mine making very good money at staff level had them reach out to get him to come interview, saying they would at least double his comp.

Another friend at G said the “smartest person in the office was poached by this company TGS, have you heard of them?”

I would recommend the book The Man Who Solved the Market about Medallion founder Jim Simons. It doesn't go over the strategy extensively but goes through the history and culture of the firm. From reading it I would attribute their performance to execution. They have an incredible pipeline and hire almost entirely engineers and scientists. They have a rigorous scientific method in finding and executing on signals. And they've resisted taking more money and earning more on the management fee, opting for performance.

Everything about them is boring. They're well paid sure, but they're based in long island and hire mostly grey beards and don't overhire. Compare that to Jane Street hiring interns jumping through silly hoops like betting poker chips on puzzles. It's a bit of a farce.

Theoretically other firms could copy this, but the main goal of a hedge fund manager is keeping AUM. High AUM and poor performance is better than low AUM and strong performance. So its a lot easier to optimize on maximizing AUM and managing your brand. There aren't a lot of mathematicians that start hedge funds so the people starting them already seed the company with the wrong culture to replicate RenTech.

It's probably pretty easy to keep the returns on a pot as small as $10bn sweet if you just reserve all your best alphas for that fund. There are proprietary trading firms trading pots that size for a single shareholder.

What I've been told is that Rentech also effectively use their public funds as a source of revenue to juice development of proprietary platform, so some of it is business cunning rather than a hard technical edge.

They were also got on the quant train very early.

To even have those ‘best alphas’ in the first place and then select them in advance for your best fund is the impressive part. The returns are insane even if the fund is capped.

They were successful long before they had those public funds though.

RenTech is also a bit different than Jane Street. While smart people no doubt work at Jane Street, some very serious brains have worked at RenTech and contributed to Medallion, people like Elwyn Berlekamp.