The Medallion Fund cited appears to be the one that made its impressive returns by gaming the tax system:<p><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-03/the-irs-challenges-a-hedge-fund-tax-trick" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-03/the-irs-chal...</a>
"founded by former Cold War code breaker James Simons"<p>That is a weird description. Yes, Simons did that, but a normal description would be "former mathematician".
>Signition is a play on words including “signal” and “recognition.”<p>but i could not help but think of "momentum ignition", a strategy that is a little bit more sinister than what amounts to no more than statistical methods for return and risk estimation.<p>edit: on further thought "sigma ignition" is a rather darkly funny way to think about it too.
Click-baity headline. Yes, he's 78. Yes, he's starting a hedge fund. But he worked at Renaissance (the gold standard of hedge funds) from 2003 - 2010, and was preparing to start it for the 4 years the non-compete was in place.
Scientists starting hedge funds isn't a new phenomenon. I forget the name (kinda telling) but it was an all star team of physicists and nobel prize winners doing some triangular arbitrage (?) and then blowing up spectacularly. Apart from HFT, lot of quant or algorithm based funds never seems to last longer than the market will let them. You see successful money managers but rarely are they quant based strategists. It never made sense as to why you would need so much science in a field where investing and trading is an art half of the time. I might not be understand how quants typically work which adds to my biased thinking but we've seen many like this. Reminds me of what Warren Buffet said "It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong."