On The Man Who Solved the Market — Gregory Zuckerman
Jim Simons did not build a better trader. He removed the trader. The Medallion fund — the most successful money machine in history — was built on a single unsentimental premise: the most predictable, exploitable pattern in any market is the human being on the other side of the trade.
Emotion is a signal. Renaissance simply decided to trade against it rather than feel it.
There was never one golden signal. Zuckerman’s account makes clear that Medallion’s edge was thousands of faint, individually unimpressive correlations, stitched together by mathematicians and code-breakers who did not know or ca…