Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Jim Simons Will Not Retire, Pushing For Stake Sale To CIC, SPY Soon To Hit Infinity

Everyone's favorite SPY gunner, chain smoker and owner of the 60th fastest supercomputer in the world is putting retirement plans on hold (hopefully not because he plans on driving the SPY to infinity+Pi), and instead is trying to dump a multi-billion portion of RenTec to China Investment Corp, just as that great regulatory Rip Van Winkle f/k/a SEC woke up from hibernation and decided to poke a tad in the East Setauket books. From the WSJ:
"There is no plan for Mr. Simons to relinquish his role as chairman or to sell his significant ownership interest in Renaissance," Mr. Gasthalter said, declining to discuss what factors have changed or when specific retirement plans might resume.

For much of its 27-year history, Renaissance has been among the most envied hedge-fund firms in the world, as Mr. Simons's investing success has made him a billionaire several times over and one of the wealthiest money managers anywhere.

But Renaissance clients have pulled billions of dollars since early 2008 as performance has suffered in its biggest funds open to outside investors. Firmwide, assets have shrunk to about $17 billion from a mid-2007 peak of some $36 billion. A person familiar with the firm said requests by investors to pull money have slowed lately [$87 million in May RIEF withdrawals is not what one would consider major slowage]
Do you see what happens Larry when a 71 year old ends up putting (a portion) of his retirement fund in RIEF?

Of course, aside from permaramp of SPY in perpetuity, this means that market dictators in waiting Brown and Mercer will have to wait a little longer before inheriting the world's most divergent duo of hedge funds in the form of Medallion and RIEF, the first having a roughly -5x P&L correlation with the second.
Meanwhile, two veteran Renaissance insiders, speech-recognition experts Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, are considered likely successors to lead the firm. Mr. Gasthalter said Messrs. Brown and Mercer declined to comment.
Maybe Messrs Brown and Mercer are also good at text-recognition. Hoping against hope that that might be true, here is our complete non-AES Rijndel encrypted message: leave the goddamn, broken market alone already and stop trading with yourselves. Sphere: Related Content
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