>>12006060Read this book senpai. In summary:
1) They started before anyone else. They were not the first to trade securities with computers, but they were the first to do it the way it is done now.
2) They fucked around for about a decade doing typical macro shopping, losing tons of money, they were an average investment firm for a long time. For most of the 90s and early 00s, they were outpaced by firms like W.E.Shaw, Bezos alma mater.
3) They have always been amassing as much data as they physically could. This is probably their biggest advantage. Since the 80s they have been storing data for its own sake, storing data that was too fine grained for them to use, and storing data that would only be useful later.
4) They combined cutting edge mathematicians with cutting edge computer scientists. They constantly poached high performing researchers from math and CS to join them.
It's a perfect combo of time in the market, innovation, data and sheer brainpower. It's not Simons fucking around no a computer with his buddies on Long Island. Think of it like a massive, classified, self-funding, global research project into the foundations of financial physics. It's more like the Manhattan Project than Wolf of Wall Street.
