Re: Renaisssance

Very good description.
Some clarification regarding to Renaissance Technologies.
In 2008, Renaissance's flagship Medallion Fund was still up huge (around 80% or so) after 5/44 fees. Medallion is a closed fund that does not take outside capital for quite a few years. Among $8B to $9B Medallion fund, there is about 1% outside capital. In last a few years, they made over 100% gross return each year, and every year they reset their capital back to $8B to $9B due to the capacity issue. Majority people working in Renaissance are millionaires. I really like their policy of keeping capital at the level that works best for the strategies. It shows their responsibility of managing capital, unlike some funds focus more on AUM (asset under management) than capacity and performance.
As to Renaissance Institutional fund, it's not a market neutral hedge fund, it's a long biased fund. It opens to outside investors. Considering that it's long biased fund and overall broad markets were down around 40%, 12% loss is not bad at all. Investors who invested in this fund were not mad at the performance at all, they were mad because they could not get any piece of Medallion.
Jim Simons is a very successful quant. But he is not the only great quant in Renaissance. In fact, two top researcher from IBM research lab are more responsible for Renaissance recent performance.
One cons against Renaissance is that it's a Motel California: you can only check in and you cannot check out. Once you work for renaissance, you work for them forever unless you switch to another industry. But with that kind of compensation and investment return, who would like to jump the ship?