THE CODE BREAKER
"We don't hire anyone from Wall Street. We hire mathematicians and physicists. We don't override the models. The models are smarter than we are." — Jim Simons
ONE
THE PATTERN
INT. SIMONS FAMILY HOME, BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS - DAY (1950)
A modest suburban home. YOUNG JIM, 12, sits at the kitchen table surrounded by math textbooks far beyond his grade level. His FATHER, a shoe factory manager, watches from the doorway.
Brookline, Massachusetts. 1950.
FATHER
Jimmy, your teacher called. She says you finished the entire year's math curriculum in six weeks.
YOUNG JIM
(not looking up)
It was too easy. The patterns were obvious.
FATHER
Patterns?
YOUNG JIM
Everything is patterns, Dad. Numbers, shapes, the way the leaves fall off the tree outside. There are rules underneath everything. Most people can't see them. I can.
FATHER
(sitting down beside him)
And what do you do when you see a pattern?
YOUNG JIM
I figure out the formula. Then I know what comes next.
INT. MIT, MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT - DAY (1958)
A chalkboard filled with topology equations. YOUNG JIM, 20, argues with a PROFESSOR. Other graduate students watch nervously.
MIT. 1958. Jim Simons enters the graduate program in mathematics at age 20. He will earn his PhD by 23.
PROFESSOR
Mr. Simons, your proof of the Bernstein conjecture shortcut is — frankly, it's elegant. But you skipped three standard intermediate steps.
YOUNG JIM
The intermediate steps are unnecessary. They exist because previous mathematicians were cautious. I prefer direct.
PROFESSOR
Mathematics values rigor.
YOUNG JIM
Mathematics values truth. And the shortest path to truth is the most beautiful one.
INT. INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES, PRINCETON - DAY (1964)
A secure government facility. YOUNG JIM, 26, now with a PhD, sits in a windowless room surrounded by IBM mainframes and classified documents. The room is marked "RESTRICTED — TOP SECRET."
The Institute for Defense Analyses. A Cold War think tank working with the NSA. Jim Simons is recruited to break Soviet codes.
NSA DIRECTOR
Dr. Simons, the Soviets have changed their encryption protocol. Our existing methods can't crack it. We need new mathematics.
YOUNG JIM
(studying printouts)
The encryption is pattern-based. All encryption is. You just need to find the right lens. Give me the data and a month.
NSA DIRECTOR
You have two weeks.
JIM lights a cigarette, turns to the printouts. He begins to see it — the hidden structure in the noise. His pen moves faster.
SIMONS (breaking the fourth wall)
The NSA taught me the most important lesson of my life: there are patterns hidden in every dataset. The human eye can't see them. But mathematics can. Code-breaking and investing would turn out to be the same problem: find the signal in the noise. Bet on the signal. Ignore everything else.
INT. STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY, CHAIRMAN'S OFFICE - DAY (1968)
JIM SIMONS, 30, is the youngest department chairman in Stony Brook's history. His office is a chaos of papers, cigarette ash, and half-drunk coffee cups. A COLLEAGUE knocks.
1968. Jim Simons is fired from the NSA for publicly opposing the Vietnam War. He becomes chairman of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University.
COLLEAGUE
Jim, the Chern-Simons paper is getting extraordinary attention. The topologists at Princeton say it could be the most important work in differential geometry in twenty years.
SIMONS
(lighting a cigarette)
That's gratifying. But I've been thinking about something else. Something that pays better than topology.
COLLEAGUE
What pays better than topology?
SIMONS
The stock market.
COLLEAGUE
(laughing)
You're a world-class mathematician. You want to play the stock market?
SIMONS
I don't want to play it. I want to solve it.
CUT TO:
TWO
RENAISSANCE
INT. SMALL OFFICE, SETAUKET, LONG ISLAND - DAY (1982)
A strip mall office. Nothing about it says "hedge fund." SIMONS, 44, stands at a whiteboard covered in equations. A small team of MATHEMATICIANS and PHYSICISTS sits around a folding table. No suits. No ties. Chain smoke fills the room.
1982. Jim Simons founds Renaissance Technologies in a strip mall on Long Island. He hires no one from Wall Street.
SIMONS
The premise is simple. Financial markets generate data. Enormous amounts of data. Price movements, volume, spreads, correlations, seasonal patterns. Hidden inside that data are patterns. Not random noise — actual, repeatable, exploitable patterns.
PHYSICIST
You're saying markets are deterministic?
SIMONS
Not deterministic. Probabilistic. The same distinction that separates classical mechanics from quantum mechanics. We don't need to know what will happen. We need to know what is likely to happen. And if we're right fifty-one percent of the time, across thousands of trades, we make a fortune.
MATHEMATICIAN
Fifty-one percent? That's barely above random.
SIMONS
Barely above random, times ten thousand trades a day, equals the most profitable trading operation in human history. The edge is small. The volume makes it enormous.
INT. RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES, SERVER ROOM - NIGHT (1988)
Rows of humming computers. Blinking lights. SIMONS stands in the server room with ROBERT MERCER and PETER BROWN, both newly hired from IBM's speech recognition lab.
1988. Jim Simons launches the Medallion Fund. He recruits Robert Mercer and Peter Brown from IBM, where they pioneered computational linguistics. They have never worked in finance.
SIMONS
Bob, Peter — at IBM you taught computers to recognize human speech patterns. I want you to teach computers to recognize market patterns.
MERCER
(deadpan)
Markets are noisier than speech.
SIMONS
But the underlying principle is the same. Statistical inference from large datasets. You don't need to understand why a market moves. You need to observe that it moves in predictable ways under certain conditions. The why is for economists. The what is for mathematicians.
BROWN
And we never override the model?
SIMONS
Never. The models are smarter than we are. Our job is to make the models smarter still. The moment a human overrides a model based on intuition, we become every other hedge fund on Wall Street. And every other hedge fund on Wall Street loses money.
INT. RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES, TRADING FLOOR - DAY (1993)
Unlike any trading floor on Wall Street. No screaming. No televisions showing CNBC. Just quiet rooms of scientists staring at screens full of code. SIMONS walks through, chain-smoking, checking readouts.
1993. The Medallion Fund returns 39.4% after fees. It has not had a losing year. Wall Street begins to notice.
SIMONS
(to the team)
Last month, a reporter from Bloomberg asked me to explain our strategy. I said no. He asked why. I said: because if I explain it, it stops working. He thought I was joking. I was not.
A screen shows the fund's performance: a line going up at an angle that defies financial gravity.
SIMONS (breaking the fourth wall)
Wall Street thought we were lucky. Then they thought we were cheating. Then they tried to copy us and failed. They failed because they misunderstood the fundamental premise. This is not a trading firm with a math department. This is a math department that happens to trade. The difference is everything.
INT. RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES, SIMONS'S OFFICE - DAY (2000)
Dot-com mania. Markets are going insane. SIMONS, 62, sits calmly while a YOUNG RESEARCHER rushes in.
YOUNG RESEARCHER
Jim, the NASDAQ is up forty percent this year. Tech stocks are parabolic. Should we adjust the models to capture the momentum?
SIMONS
The models already see the momentum. They also see the probability of a correction. We don't chase. We don't panic. We execute the models. When this bubble pops — and it will pop — the models will be positioned correctly. Because the models don't have feelings.
When the dot-com bubble bursts, the Medallion Fund returns 98.5% in 2000. While the market collapses, Renaissance makes nearly a billion dollars.
CUT TO:
THREE
THE MEDALLION
INT. FINANCIAL CONFERENCE, NEW YORK - DAY (2005)
A packed auditorium. HEDGE FUND MANAGERS and WALL STREET EXECUTIVES fill every seat. SIMONS, 67, stands at the podium. He is wearing a rumpled shirt, no tie, and Merrell hiking shoes.
MODERATOR
Jim, the Medallion Fund has returned over sixty percent annually, after fees, for fifteen consecutive years. Nothing in finance comes close. How?
SIMONS
(smiling)
I can't tell you how. But I can tell you what we don't do. We don't read annual reports. We don't meet with management teams. We don't have opinions about the economy. We have data, models, and computers. That's it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
But surely human judgment must play a role —
SIMONS
Human judgment is the enemy. Humans are biased. Humans are emotional. Humans see patterns that don't exist and miss patterns that do. The computer has no ego. No fear. No greed. That is its advantage.
ANOTHER AUDIENCE MEMBER
Are you saying the entire financial industry is wrong?
SIMONS
(lighting a cigarette, ignoring the no-smoking sign)
I'm saying the entire financial industry is human. We are not.
INT. RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES - DAY (2008)
The global financial crisis. Markets are in freefall. At Renaissance, the atmosphere is calm. Scientists work at their terminals. The models execute trades.
2008. Global financial crisis. The S&P 500 falls 38%. Medallion Fund returns 82%.
BROWN
Jim, the outside funds are getting hit. RIEF and RIFF are down. But Medallion is printing money.
SIMONS
Medallion is always printing money. That's why we closed it to outside investors. The fund is too good to share. At five billion dollars, the edge starts to decay. We keep it small. We keep it ours.
MERCER
The employees are getting very rich.
SIMONS
Good. They deserve it. They built the machine. The machine works. Every PhD we hired over an MBA justified that decision a thousandfold.
SIMONS (breaking the fourth wall)
People ask me why Medallion is closed to outside investors. The answer is simple: the fund is capacity-constrained. It works because it's small and fast. If it were larger, the trades would move the market. The edge would disappear. So we keep it to ourselves. Our employees invest in Medallion. Their children's children will be wealthy. That is the reward for building something that works.
INT. SIMONS FOUNDATION, NEW YORK - DAY (2010)
A bright, modern office. Scientific papers and mathematical art cover the walls. SIMONS, 72, and MARILYN SIMONS review grant proposals.
2010. Jim Simons retires from day-to-day management of Renaissance. He turns his full attention to the Simons Foundation, which will donate over $4 billion to mathematics, science, and education.
MARILYN
The autism research initiative has funded thirty-seven labs. The math education program is in a thousand schools.
SIMONS
Good. But I want to do more. I want to fund basic research. The kind of research that has no obvious application. The kind that takes twenty years to matter. String theory, genomics, cosmology — the fundamental questions. Nobody else funds that anymore. The government won't. Corporations won't. Someone has to.
MARILYN
You made your fortune finding patterns in financial data. Now you want to find patterns in the universe.
SIMONS
(grinning)
Same job. Bigger dataset.
CUT TO:
FOUR
THE LEGACY
INT. SIMONS'S HOME, MANHATTAN - EVENING (2019)
An apartment filled with modern art and mathematical sculptures. SIMONS, 81, sits in an armchair. A cigarette burns in an ashtray. MARILYN reads nearby.
MARILYN
Bloomberg updated the Billionaires Index. Your net worth is twenty-three billion.
SIMONS
Twenty-three billion dollars from a mathematics degree and a willingness to ignore everything Wall Street believes. Not bad for a code breaker from Brookline.
MARILYN
Do you ever regret leaving pure mathematics? You could have been the greatest topologist of your generation.
SIMONS
(taking a long drag)
I did topology. I did code-breaking. I did the Medallion Fund. I did philanthropy. Regret requires believing you chose wrong. I chose everything.
INT. RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES, LOBBY - DAY (2023)
The entrance to Renaissance. No sign on the building — just a security checkpoint. Inside, scientists work in silence. The machines trade. The models execute. SIMONS, 85, visits one last time. He walks slowly through the halls, nodding to researchers.
From 1988 to 2023, the Medallion Fund generated over $100 billion in trading profits. After fees of 5% management and 44% performance, investors — all Renaissance employees — earned returns averaging 66% per year. No other fund in history comes close.
YOUNG RESEARCHER
(approaching cautiously)
Dr. Simons, I just want to say — you changed everything. You proved that markets aren't random. That math can beat intuition.
SIMONS
I didn't prove markets aren't random. I proved they're not entirely random. There's a difference. And that difference, tiny as it is, across millions of trades, is worth a hundred billion dollars. Never underestimate a small edge applied consistently.
EXT. STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY - SUNSET (PRESENT DAY)
The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook. A beautiful building funded by Jim Simons. Students walk across the campus he helped build. Mathematics lives here.
SIMONS (breaking the fourth wall)
I was a mathematician who broke codes for the NSA, published theorems that still bear my name, and built a machine that printed money for thirty years. But when I think about my life, I don't think about the money. I think about the patterns. The hidden structures that hold the universe together. Mathematics is the language of reality. I was lucky enough to speak it fluently. And I was lucky enough to live in a country that let a shoe factory owner's son from Brookline become whatever he wanted to be. I chose to be curious. Curiosity paid well.
FADE TO BLACK.
Jim Simons passed away on May 10, 2024, at the age of 86. The Medallion Fund's 66% average annual return over 30+ years remains the greatest track record in the history of finance. The Simons Foundation has donated over $4 billion to mathematics, science, autism research, and education. Renaissance Technologies continues to operate. It still hires only PhDs. It still does not hire anyone from Wall Street.