Renaissance Technologies

Renaissance Technologies LLC (also known as RenTec or RenTech) is an American hedge fund based in East Setauket, New York, on Long Island, that specializes in systematic trading using quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analysis. Renaissance originated as Monemetrics, founded in 1978 by mathematician and former Cold War codebreaker Jim Simons, and adopted its current name in 1982. In 1988, the firm established the Medallion Fund, a form of Leonard Baum's mathematical models expanded by algebraist James Ax, to explore correlations from which it could profit. The hedge fund was named Medallion in honor of the math awards Simons and Ax had won. Simons ran Renaissance until his retirement in late 2009, when he was succeeded by Peter Brown and Robert Mercer. He continued to play a role at the firm as non-executive chairman until 2021. He remained invested in its funds, particularly the Medallion fund, until his death in 2024. The company is now run by Brown (after Mercer resigned). Both were computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research. The fund has $165 billion in discretionary assets under management (including leverage) as of April 2021.