The Man who Solved the Market, Gregory Zuckerman, 2019 - Its not easy for a biography of a famous mathematician/scientist/investor to satisfy the general as well the technical audience. Very few books manage to walk the tight line of being satisfactory to the technically-minded while not alienating the lay reader. this one falls a bit flat on several fronts as its neither a biography of Simons, nor is it satisfactory as a book on Quant investing.
It meanders into mild character portraits of Laufer, Baum, Straus, Ax, Brown, Mercer and a myriad others who built the algorithms at Renaissance. Jim Simons himself is relegated to the sidelines for the most part. What was even more annoying for me was the number of pagers spent describing Mercers’ election funding and his impact on Trump election by involving Breitbart news and Bannon. Some of these are of course crucial to understanding the political tussle within the company but to me it came across as irrelevant.
What renaissance and its team of market outsiders have achieved is nothing short of mind-blowing. Some of the challenges they faced in terms of not having adequate clean data, not having enough computing power and facing the usual problem of impact costs are what quant firms face to this day and for them to have pioneered the earliest machine-learning and automatic portfolio rebalancing algorithms and to have done it at that time when Jim Simons was passing 50 and done it right with stunning returns is what makes the story interesting. This book however will teach you nothing more. 7/10