Legendary investor James Simons has stepped down as chairman at his secretive hedge fund Renaissance Technologies.
The 82-year-old Simons — a former math professor who became one of the most successful investors in history by pioneering computer-based stock trading — notified investors in December that he would be passing the torch to RenTech’s chief executive Peter Brown on Jan. 1.
Simons has not been in charge of the day-to-day operations of the $116 billion fund for nearly a decade, but his continued role as chairman had maintained his profile at the fund he founded in 1982.
Simons, who has a PhD in math and was a codebreaker during the Cold War, will remain on the board, a company spokesman confirmed. RenTech pioneered the quantitative trading strategy that has become a cornerstone of the hedge fund industry and made Simons a very wealthy man.
Forbes estimates Simons’ net worth at $23.5 billion and he has consistently been one of the highest-earning hedgies in the world even after RenTech shuttered its flagship Medallion fund to outside money. In 1993, the Medallion fund was converted into a private investment vehicle for employees that has returned 40 percent a year on average since its inception in 1988.
In 2018, The Post reported that Simons’ annual compensation worked out to a tidy $194,000 per hour. That number might have been impacted a bit a year later, when the feds went after RenTech for failing to pay $6.8 billion in taxes out of the Medallion fund over a 15-year period.
That same fund famously returned 98 percent in 2008 as financial crisis crushed markets. It returned 76 percent in 2020 as the COVID pandemic ravaged the global economy.
While notoriously press-shy, Simons as dropped the veil a few times over the years. In 2017, he told a business breakfast that he was no fan of President Donald Trump.
“I think it’s basically terrible that we have a president remotely like our current president,” Simons said. “We’ve had some doozies but never of that caliber.”
That take on Trump put him at odds with his mentee and former RenTech co-CEO Robert Mercer. Mercer was revealed as Trump’s biggest financial backer in the 2016 campaign and played a key role putting Steve Bannon into Trump’s orbit.
Mercer resigned as co-CEO of RenTech just weeks after Simons’ 2017 salvo against Trump.
This article originally appeared on the New York Post.
