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I always used to misspell Renaissance as I was typing it out, R-E-N, and then I would sort of like not really know what came from there. But I learned a mnemonic to make sure I get it right.
Oh, I thought you were going to say you've typed it so many times now over the past month.
Well, there's that too. But you ready for this? You can't spell Renaissance without A-I. Oh. Touché, touché. All right, let's do it.
Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?
Welcome to Season 14, Episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. They say, David, that as an investor, you can't beat the market or time the market, that you're better off indexing and dollar cost averaging rather than trying to be an active stock picker.
They say there's no persistence of returns for hedge funds, that this year's big winner can be next year's big loser, and that nobody gets huge outperformance without taking huge risk.
When I was in college, I actually took an economics class with Burton Malkiel, who, of course, you know, was involved in starting Vanguard and is a big proponent of all that. And that is what I learned, Ben.
Well, David, it turns out they were wrong. Today, listeners, we tell the story of the best-performing investment firm in history, Renaissance Technologies, or Rentech. Their 30-year track record managing billions of dollars has better returns than anyone you have ever heard of, including Berkshire Hathaway, Bridgewater, George Soros, Peter Lynch, or anyone else. So why haven't you heard of them?
Or if you have, why don't you know much about them? Well, their eye-popping performance is matched only by their extreme secrecy, and they are unusual in almost every way. Their founder, Jim Simons, worked for the U.S. government in the Cold War as a codebreaker before starting Renaissance.
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