Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
63 published records
01 / evaluation
“By the way, we know all this because we have to thank Greg Zuckerman, author of The Man Who Solved the Market, which is the only book out there that is solely dedicated to RenTech and Jim Simons.”
02 / belief
“I assumed that was the whole quant industry and it was very surprising to me to discover that I believe.”
03 / belief
“I think the analogy here is like sports. There are all-star players, there are Hall of Famers, and then there are LeBron and MJ.”
04 / belief
“To distinguish what’s a good problem and what’s a problem that no one’s going to care about the answer to anyway, that’s taste. And I think I have good taste.”
05 / belief
“At this point in time, I think really the best data you could get from providers out there was maybe open and close data on securities pricing.”
06 / belief
“Why do they charge themselves 44% carry and 5% management fees? I think Jim talks about this that, oh, I pay the fees just like everybody else.”
07 / belief
“A long-term illiquid thing like venture capital, highly speculative, versus we’re going to trade whether we think the French Franc is going to go up or down tomorrow based on the whim of some government leader.”
08 / belief
“David, I think we should throw this out so people understand the volume of this.”
09 / belief
“I think legitimately RenTech may just have persistently been able to out-execute their competitors.”
10 / belief
“When Jim started working on code breaking, I think he just looked right back to his experience trading in the markets and was like, whoa, this is the same thing.”
11 / uncertainty
“With this combination now of much, much, much better and deeper data from Straus, and Berlekamp coming in and working with Ax on the models and saying, hey, we should be smart about the bet sizing that we’re doing in the trades that are coming out of these models, versus I don’t know what they were doing before.”
12 / belief
“I want to go all in on this. I think with some tweaks, we can be up 80% after fees next year.”
13 / belief
“I think together with Jim, his partners, and whatever money Lenny put in, they had a little less than $4 million in this initial capital.”
14 / belief
“The fee stream on the institutional fund may entirely belong to branding. But I think there are a lot of public equity firms and a lot of hedge funds that have a lot of branding power that have on average market returns with decent Sharpe ratios and are able to raise because they’ve built a brand.”
15 / uncertainty
“I actually subscribed the Acquired account on Instagram to Class of Palm Beach. I don’t know how many people we’re following.”
16 / uncertainty
“I am going to argue that the data is a cornered resource. I don’t know for sure about the model.”
17 / belief
“I think if it’s true that they’re starting to see the same talent flow as everyone else, that would be concerning.”
18 / uncertainty
“The bull case for the GP and LP stakeholders in Medallion, which is, I don’t know, 500 people in the world, and none of the rest of us can get any exposure to it.”
19 / uncertainty
“The answer we got back is unsurprising. They said, we don’t know because they don’t share anything.”
20 / belief
“Now, I think where you’re going with this is perhaps similarly along the lines to Caesar’s Palace or a casino.”
21 / uncertainty
“I don’t know for sure, but I think Mellanox built their business on quant finance.”
22 / belief
“I think we can rule out scale economies for sure. If anything, there are anti scale economies here.”
23 / belief
“I think the counter-positioning for RenTech or for Medallion, specifically, is I do think the single model approach versus the multi-model, multi-strategy approach that most others have, does have benefits like I was talking about in the tapestries.”
24 / belief
“I think the argument against that, though, is that Medallions sold after a day-and-a-half to somebody else who bought at that lower price.”
25 / belief
“I believe if I have my research right, in 2004, they actually achieved a Sharpe ratio of 7.”
26 / belief
“I think that is often missed is that these really lucrative professions and businesses can often produce R&D that becomes valuable elsewhere.”
27 / belief
“I always used to misspell Renaissance as I was typing it out at R-E-N, and then I would not really know what came from there, but I learned a mnemonic to make sure I get it right.”
28 / belief
“In 1993, one of the mathematicians that Jim had recruited to RenTech, a guy named Nick Patterson, gets especially passionate about going out and recruiting new talent along with Jim. And this is (I think) one of the keys to RenTech and the culture there.”
29 / belief
“I think the culture of managing an academic environment in a fashion like a lab, but without letting it spin into the frivolity of a lab that Jim Simons set up.”
30 / evaluation
“The strategy that RenTech is employing right now, they’re just deeming doesn’t work at north of $5 billion.”
31 / belief
“I think from what everything we can tell from the outside, Renaissance actually has built a large scale computer system that discovers relationships between different entities in the world—stocks, commodities, bond prices—and whether it can explain them or not, it is correct most of the time.”
32 / uncertainty
“There’s one slight nuance to that, but I don’t know how much it holds water. The apologist nuance would be, well, Warren Buffett could be on the other side of the trade, and Medallion could make money on that trade with Warren over its time horizon of a day-and-a-half.”
33 / uncertainty
“Now, I don’t know how it is actually structured, but there was something about this whole crazy 44% carry that just wasn’t sitting with me right throughout the research, because I kept asking myself why.”
34 / belief
“I spent a bunch of time scrolling through 13Fs over the last decade from the Medallion filings. They’re all from (I think) two institutional funds.”
35 / belief
“Absolutely. That is the undeniable, yes, quant funds create value in the world thing, which (I think) it’s very easy to say quant funds provide no value because it’s zero sum, they’re not actually providing the capital to businesses to do something with.”
36 / belief
“I think most investment firms try to get their ideas out of people, and then do an incredibly rigorous amount of data analysis to figure out if they should put those trades on or not.”
37 / belief
“I think the counterparties are the people there, the dentists that they’re taking advantage of.”
38 / commitment
“First the announcement. David and I are going to be emceeing Modern Treasury Transfer again this year.”
39 / belief
“You are selecting into that. I think if that’s what you want, then what better place in the world.”
40 / belief
“I think that could be, so maybe that feeds into process power. Okay, for me it is some combination of process power and counter positioning.”
41 / commitment
“I even find this about myself, that I will naturally take the position of the foil to the person across from me.”
42 / belief
“Although I think he quit later in life, but he definitely chain-smoked the better part of the first (call it) 75 years or something.”
43 / uncertainty
“Now of course the employees are the investors in Medallion, so you could just argue it’s actually silly to cut them up, but I don’t know.”
44 / evaluation
“Why do they have this if there are no outside LPs? And this was the best thing I could come up with.”
45 / belief
“I think the third puzzle piece of what makes RenTech so unique and defensible is Medallion’s structure itself, that it is an LP-GP fund with 5% management fee and 44% carry.”
46 / belief
“I think we’re going to have two episodes in a row of counter-positioning at scale.”
47 / uncertainty
“We don’t know anything about fundamentals, but we’ve got a really good algorithm.”
48 / belief
“One way to look at it, which may not be the be-all-and-end-all, but I think is a good way to compare Jim’s era at Medallion versus Peter and Bob’s era.”
49 / belief
“I think there might also be some argument to the data that that older data is helpful, but its value decays over time as markets evolve.”
50 / belief
“When I was in college, I actually took an economics class with Burton Malkiel, who of course was involved in starting Vanguard and who’s a big proponent of all that. And that is what I learned, Ben.”
51 / belief
“Some of them maybe, but I think most of them are the model is suggesting things, and there is a person or persons who are the master portfolio allocators that pull the trigger or don’t pull the trigger.”
52 / belief
“I was thinking about this in the middle of the night, and I think there are three layers to the effective non-compete that happens with RenTech.”
53 / belief
“Less than the broader market, but they still were a mirror of the broader market. I think the RIEF, their institutional fund, yes it works as expected.”
54 / belief
“I totally agree with all of them. It is, in my opinion, false to say that quantitative finance does not create value for the world.”
55 / prediction
“I think there’s process power just because it’s 30+ years of complexity that’s been built up.”
56 / prediction
“There he comes up with the idea that, hey, we should trade more frequently, a lot more frequently, because if what we’re trying to do is understand the state of the market from the data we have and then predict the future state of the market, and then combine that with figuring out the right bet sizing to make.”
57 / evaluation
“I think perhaps in part because of the trading losses, James Ax starts to get a little disillusioned too, and he tells Jim that he wants to move out to California with Sandor Straus, who started working with them at this point—Sandor was another Stony Brook alum that joined them—and the two of them want to move out to California and do trading out there.”
58 / commitment
“I am going to read directly from the man who solved the market because Greg Zuckerman just put it perfectly.”
59 / evaluation
“We’ve mentioned this concept a couple of times this episode where, okay, great, it’s amazing to have a fund that 25X’s, or a year where you have a 100% investment return, or I bought Bitcoin yesterday and it doubled overnight.”
60 / preference
“To be super illustrative because I think your natural tendency is like, oh I can understand why these two things would be related, the relationship may not be what you figure.”
61 / preference
“I think I read basically every primary source thing on Jim or Renaissance on the whole internet, but I assume you got that from Howard.”
62 / commitment
“While the resources out there are scarce because for one, employees sign a lifetime non-disclosure agreement, David and I are going to take you through everything we’ve learned about the firm from our research dating all the way back before Jim Simons started as a math professor to understand it all.”
63 / prediction
“We so clearly outperform the market, you’re still going to take this deal even if we take more of this because there’s just a mispricing here.”