Is Text Analysis key to Renaissance's Success? - Alternative Data Sources

Jim Simons is the greatest moneymaker in modern financial history, and no other investor – Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Ray Dalio, Steve Cohen, or George Soros – can touch his record. His firm has earned profits of more than $100 billion, and between 1994 and 2004, its signature fund, The Medallion Fund, averaged 70 per cent annual return. Medallion's returns don't seem to correlate with known factors and the only thing most people get to know is that the strategy is "statistical arbitrage". People are confounded by the fact that the proliferation of other quantitative hedge funds in recent years hasn't caused Medallion's performance to deteriorate. Last year, there was a very readable book about Jim Simons: On the man who solved the markets – How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, Penguin 2019.