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Re:Jim Simons has died by agumonkey on Friday May 10, 2024 @01:17PM (#40321443)
I'd still wish to have details on this (I too heard of similar numbers for his fund before), because in my newb eyes .. such returns would mean they could absorb a huge chunk of the planet liquidity.
Re:Jim Simons has died by tomp on Friday May 10, 2024 @01:35PM (#40321634)
No, because such returns aren't scalable.

According to industry rumors, RenTech is somewhere between $10-20bn AUM (assets under management, i.e. the capital used for trading), and the profit that they make, they can't reinvest, they have to take it out as profit.

Re:Jim Simons has died by jamiek88 on Friday May 10, 2024 @02:21PM (#40322174)
How come? Why do they have to take the profits out and can’t compound it?

I know literally zero about this stuff!

Re:Jim Simons has died by tomp on Friday May 10, 2024 @03:43PM (#40323084)
The simplistic explanation is, if you're doing arbitrage - i.e. "fixing market mispricing", there's only so much arbitrage you can do before you fix the price...

This is of course a completely theoretical proposition, because in reality you don't know what the "fair price" is. You don't even have probabilities, because those are also unobservable, you only see one version of "history".

In practice, what happens is that if you trade "too much", "shit goes wrong". Both of these things require empirical estimation and are easy to get wrong.

The most obvious is the market liquidity, which you can observe at e.g. BitStamp TradeView [1] - there's only so many orders at a given price, so the more you trade, the worse price you get (the average/marginal trade).

No professional of course trades like that, especially not HFTs, but similar problems happen at every scale - you're competing with other traders, they might have better information, there's limited amount of stock in the market, the edge/alpha/expected profit you can earn decays over time as the price moves, if you trade too much you move the market and inform other participants who can then trade against you, ...

[1] https://www.bitstamp.net/market/tradeview/

Re:Jim Simons has died by WrongAssumption on Friday May 10, 2024 @02:32PM (#40322326)
When you scale up too much it creates market impact that affects returns. You basically become too much of the market.
Re:Jim Simons has died by paulpauper on Friday May 10, 2024 @04:42PM (#40323598)
I know literally zero about this stuff!

I guess you will not be getting a job there

But in seriousness, when you become so big relative to the market, you become the market.

Re:Jim Simons has died by ljosifov on Friday May 10, 2024 @04:06PM (#40323287)
You'd have to sacrifice the returns if you want bigger size. For every trade you do, there will be expected return (+ve) and then some costs to pay (-ve). Commissions and similar costs are only linear so not terrible. With increasing size, the market impact cost that's non-linear will soon overwhelm all other costs. So you keep adding alpha in your forecasts (via your research pipeline), that will be eaten away by the impact cost, as you scale up. If you keep it small (-ish - still gross pfolio will be billions) - then you will get to keep high returns.
Re:Jim Simons has died by tim333 on Friday May 10, 2024 @01:49PM (#40321792)
All investment strategies are limited as to the amount of money they will take. They probably couldn't have ran much more without reducing perfomance.
Re:Jim Simons has died by eru on Saturday May 11, 2024 @12:43AM (#40326004)
How do you 'absorb' liquidity? Are they like some kind of financial kitchen towel?