i thought the comment at the bottom of this story was interesting. maybe their big trade secrets really aren't that profound or airtight after all http://www.marketwatch.com/news/sto...x?guid={888C790C-B121-414F-B30D-CEBE8DB0C71B} Volfbeyn said that the trade secrets Renaissance has been working to protect "are nothing more than general ideas that are well known to people familiar with statistical arbitrage and quantitative finance."
Actually, they are NOTHING like LTCM. And they will NOT need a bailout anytime soon, b/c of excellent risk mgt. They don' t average down either. If you read RenTech's interview in II(institutional investor) back in 2000, Simons even explicitly said their strategies are NOTHING like LTCM. He even doubts the validity of such LTCM strategies. Ironically, they are much closer to TA. But scientific driven TA. 99
http://www.moviesoundclips.net/movies1/aliens/gameover.wav http://www.moviesoundclips.net/sound.php?id=47
yeahh damn right. they use the scientific moving average cross coupled with a scientific profit target and a scientific stop loss.
LOL.. I think he meant price action based strats. I would tend to agree. Trading at such high freqs you would have to ignore news..er ah gossip and fundies. A quantitative approach is much closer to TA than the geeks want you to believe.
These were my favorite two lines: The group's flagship $6bn Medallion fund, which trades in a lot of futures, has been quickly overtaken in growth by its newer Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund, which was launched two years ago and trades only in stocks. The Medallion fund now contains mostly Mr Simons' own money and that of Renaissance employees. The guy is basically trading his own 6 billion dollar book. That is insane.
6B ain't jack The Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund, started in mid-2005 is being offered as a "mega-fund" for institutional investors; reportedly it has a capacity of up to $100bn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies