Book Review: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons launched the quant revolution.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons launched the quant revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

A book about the most successful investment firm in history should be well-worth reading but at first, I struggled to glean insight from narrative history and character back story. In the end, it was worth it. I guess the author had to fill the book with the details he could find given his limited access. 

What I learned from The Man Who Solved The Market:

• Impressed with the product market timing that a group of quants eventually came upon for the right mathematical models at a time when computing power was large enough, data plenty but scare, and the market was inefficient

• Great inside look into the complicated team building and competitive dynamics that are inevitable in any successful organization

• A story that persistence pays… or is that success bias? Who knows. Jim Simons worked long and hard on cracking the market with math without clear success.

• If you believe the author (and his account is clearly heavily reported by one particularly source) Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah had a transformative role in both Brexit and Trump. Reading that part of the narrative, at the end, was interesting and new for me.
  

Mixed Book Review:

• The first 100 pages of the book are slow because progress was slow. The book also delves into the personalities of star mathematicians in the early days who worked with Simons but didn’t stay for the period when the team cracked the market. Not sure I needed that.

• Sometimes it feels a little too Page 6 and gossipy.

The author clearly relied on a couple of disgruntled sources and that’s not a full picture.

Quotes:

Mercer: “We’re right 50.75% of the time. You can make billions that way.”
Simons “Never put your full faith in a model”