Renaissance Technologies
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| Private | |
| Industry | Investment management |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Headquarters | East Setauket, New York, United States |
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Key people
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| Products | Medallion Fund Institutional Equities Fund Institutional Diversified Alpha |
| AUM | US$65 billion (2015) |
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Number of employees
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290 (2015) |
| Website | www |
Renaissance Technologies LLC is an East Setauket, New York-based American investment management firm founded in 1982 by James Simons, an award-winning mathematician and former Cold War code breaker, which specializes in systematic trading using only quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses. Renaissance is one of the first highly successful hedge funds using quantitative trading—known as "quant hedge funds"—that rely on powerful computers and sophisticated mathematics to guide investment strategies.
In 1988 the firm established its most profitable portfolio, the Medallion Fund, which used an improved and expanded form of Leonard Baum's mathematical models, improved by algebraist James Ax, to explore correlations from which they could profit. Simons and Ax started a hedge fund and christened it Medallion in honor of the math awards that they had won.
Renaissance's flagship Medallion fund, which is run mostly for fund employees, "is famed for one of the best records in investing history, returning more than 35 percent annualized over a 20-year span". From 1994 through mid-2014 it averaged a 71.8% annual return. Renaissance offers two portfolios to outside investors—Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF) and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha (RIDA).
Simons ran Renaissance until his retirement in late 2009. The company is now jointly run by Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, two computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research. Simons continues to play a role at the firm as non-executive chairman and remains invested in its funds, particularly the secretive and consistently profitable black-box strategy known as Medallion. Because of the success of Renaissance in general and Medallion in particular, Simons has been described as the best money manager on earth. By October 2015, Renaissance had roughly $65 billion worth of assets under management, most of which belong to employees of the firm.
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Wikipedia