The Man Who Solved the Market How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution By Gregory Zuckerman

The Man Who Solved the Market How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution By Gregory Zuckerman

P A R T   O N E
Money Isn’t Everything

C H A P T E R   O N E
Jimmy Simons grabbed a broom and headed upstairs.
It was the winter of 1952 and the fourteen-year-old was
trying to earn some spending money at Breck’s garden supply near
his home in Newton, Massachusetts, the leafy Boston suburb. It
wasn’t going well. Working in a stockroom downstairs, the young
man found himself so lost in thought that he had misplaced the
sheep manure, planting seeds, and most everything else.
Frustrated, the owners asked Jimmy to walk the store’s narrow
aisles and sweep its hardwood floors, a mindless and repetitive task.
To Jimmy, the demotion felt like a stroke of luck. Finally, he was
left alone to ponder what mattered most in his life. Math. Girls. The
future.
They’re paying me to think!
Weeks later, his Christmas-time job complete, the couple who
owned the store asked Jimmy about his long-term plans.
“I want to study mathematics at MIT.”
They burst out laughing. A young man so absentminded that he
couldn’t keep track of basic gardening supplies hoped to be a math
major—at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no less?
“They thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard,”
Simons recalls.
The skepticism didn’t bother Jimmy, not even the giggles. The
teenager was filled with preternatural confidence and an unusual
determination to accomplish something special, the result of
supportive parents who had experienced both high hopes and deep
regrets in their own lives.
Marcia and Matthew Simons welcomed James Harris to the
family in the spring of 1938. She and Matty poured time and energy

The Man Who Solved the Market How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution By Gregory Zuckerman