Renaissance

I spent the day at Renaissance Technologies, where I gave an academic seminar. Renaissance is a hedge fund that created the wealth of the Simons Foundation among many other Foundations. I have many old friends there; there are many PhD astrophysicists there, including two (Kundić and Metzger) I overlapped with back when I was a graduate student at Caltech. I learned a huge amount while I was there, about how they handle data, how they decide what data to keep and why, how they manage and update strategies, and what kinds of markets they work in. Just like in astrophysics, the most interesting signals are at low signal-to-noise in the data! Appropriately, I spoke about finding exoplanets in the Kepler data. There are many connections between data-driven astrophysics and contemporary finance.