What’s dishonest? No one has said language choice is a silver bullet for all classes of security vulnerabilities. The point under contention is that we have better options for memory corruption vulnerabilities in particular.
In other words we’re not talking about whether or not something will be totally safe, but rather safer. Perfect is the enemy of good.
It’s all relative. Renaissance is famous because they do it on (low) double digit billions. On the other hand, 80% at a proprietary trading firm - where you might be working with double digit millions - isn’t spectacular. I can tell you that several small outfits in Chicago and the Bay Area return well over 200% consistently. But they are severely capacity constrained and basically disburse profits to the partners and traders each year. Their capital is only in the eight figure range.
> They probably aren't just smart, they also have some process that isn't just about being clever. They optimize their execution, they make sure their research platform is top quality,
...
> The thing about the investment business is there's a lot of focus on being smart, to the detriment of everything else that you need.
Yes, precisely. RenTech's research platform is key. All hedge funds recognize that data is integral to their success. But most funds drown in the amount of data they try to process. RenTech does not. A large number of their research team works directly on innovating data processing, not just strategy design and development.
I agree with you. I'm responding to what I think is the spirit of the question. These days if someone is asking about RenTech in the context of Mercer, they're doing so because they're mostly heard about the firm as an auxiliary topic to Mercer's political activity.
And last I was aware, yes, Simons still has the majority of shares. If I recall correctly that's publicly disclosed though.
Interestingly enough, this is also supported - sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly - by several top tech companies. It can be a bit tricky to pull off if it's not systematically endorsed by the organization, but it's often very doable.
I know a few people who work at RenTech. I would be very surprised if the operation turned out to be fraudulent. It certainly could be, but I very much doubt it.
If you have your ear to the ground you can find many proprietary trading firms which have similar or even superior returns. It's much harder to find a fund deploying similar strategies at the same capacity.
As a corollary, every single new hire at the firm is expensive in more than the traditional ways. They only have so much room in Medallion, and so they tend to be both extremely secretive and extremely protective when hiring. They've lessened up on that somewhat recently, but it's still there.
James Simons founded Renaissance in the early 80s (ish). He brought on Robert Mercer from IBM later. Then Mercer took the helm when Simons retired around 2010, if I recall correctly. Mercer himself stepped down last year (likely due to political blowback from the rest of the firm).
The backstory, for those unfamiliar with Renaissance: they have more than one fund available. Their highest performing fund, Medallion, is the one which made them famous in the 90s. In the early 2000s it was closed to outside investment (likely due to capacity constraint for the strategies it uses). It's now exclusively an investment vehicle for employees and their families, somewhat like a large proprietary trading firm.
The really interesting thing here is that Renaissance received clearance to roll employee IRAs into the Medallion fund. That leverages significant tax advantages on a fund which already provides significant returns for its employees.