
Medallion fund: a remarkably successful quant trading firm built by scientists - moh_maya
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance-s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box
======
applecore
_> Eventually the scientists went so far as to develop an in-house programming
language for their models rather than settle for a numbercentric option such
as ASCII, which was popular at the time._

I have fond memories of the late 1980s. The ASCII programming language was
very popular at the time.

~~~
Something1234
Is this sarcasm? I can't find any reference to an ASCII programming language.

~~~
fanzhang
Yes.

------
Maven911
All these funds have some commonalities: highly statistical in nature, high
probability trades, correlations, algorithms executing trades. But finding out
any of the internals of these funds is next to impossible unless one has an
"in".

Does anyone on HN have some perspective on how these funds operate
(renaissance, AQR funds etc.) ?

~~~
qwrusz
I can't offer too much insight, sorry. But I will say the "quant" fund label
is very broad. RenTec and AQR both hire PhDs and use computers to trade, but
AQR offers mutual funds with daily liquidity and they publicly disclose much
more info - RenTec as a private fund has more flexibility in what it can do.
Correspondingly, how a fund uses risk and takes on leverage can make a big
difference.

------
vfulco
Why even write an article like this? Bored journalist around the holidays or
great stealth advertising for their "open" institutional funds?

~~~
cpymchn
@vfulco Medallion is germane now for a reason the article doesn't mention:

Robert Mercer is the primary benefactor behind Breitbart. He was the number
three donor to conservative causes this election cycle (behind Sheldon Adelson
and Paul Singer).

The money coming out of Medallion helped put Trump in 1600.

~~~
SonicSoul
thanks for pointing this out! any idea why ultra rich would want alt-right to
succeed? isn't alt-right kind of about de-stabilizing the system which could
screw with their money?

