Why most Renaissance's funds did not perform well ? Only Medallion performed well in last year, since Medallion closed to outside investors, has Medallion's performance been audited ? Any potential Ponzi scheme here ?
1) No. Profitable trades were allocated to the Medallion Fund. 2) Losing trades were allocated to the "customer accounts". 3) It's similar to how Hillary Clinton did her cattle futures "trading".
How do they know "profitable" and "losing" trades before they put the trade ? (Unless they trade among its own funds, Medallion vs. "customer accounts", and let Medallion win. If so, it is worse than a Ponzi scheme. )
When a hedge fund does a trade they do an aggregate trade for all their funds. At the end of the day they tell their broker how to allocate the trades among their funds. So it is theoretically possible to allocate the winning trades to certain funds and the losers to others Of course this is illegal
they are different funds with different strategies. Medallion is a short term quantitative futures fund. This is the fund with the legendary performance that no longer has outside investors. RIEF is a more conventional long/short equity hedge fund that uses models more similar to what other quant equity funds use. RIFF is a futures fund but is longer term in nature. They have different mandates and different strategies and consequently different performance. Medallion has been so good that sharing returns with investors on a strategy with size constraints is just giving money away. The other funds that by mandate do not have a chance of being stellar they would rather collect fees on.
Here...some food for thought. http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/05/is-there-more-than-meets-eye-at-rentec.html
Renaissance's funds are the quebec fund company if I remember correctly. I think their funds specialize in tax efficiency not to make money. aic/franklin are prob top risk/return funds. but there is only one fund i truely like... that isn't a hedge fund... working as a service asst long ago i remember Renaissance's customer service to be very snoby/snippy/smugy. = /
I think you are thinking of a different Renaissance Nevous. I am sure there are a few financial firms with that name.
This is not the Renaissance fund mentioned by the OP. This is what the OP refers to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies