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Posts Tagged ‘Jim Simons’

The Past of the Futures (Renaissance RIFF) Fund

March 25th, 2010

While the RIEF fund has opened up a bit to investors, there’s virtually no information available on the Renaissance Futures RIFF fund started in 2007. In his Nov. 2008, testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Jim Simons said about RIFF that it:

“…is a slow trading fund, investing in commodities, currencies, bonds, and stock indices, and is designed to deliver an attractive return at relatively low volatility. …RIFF, started 13 months ago, did well during its first nine months but has been challenged by the turbulence of this fall, during which its returns were disappointing“.

There’s also generic information available at www.wsj.com obtained by WSJ from RIFF marketing materials:

“RIFF is a modestly-leveraged, slow-trading, global futures fund designed to provide substantial risk-adjusted returns, uncorrelated to US and global equity markets and with medium to low correlation to other asset classes… Targets holding times between nine and 12 months… The RIFF system is completely automated, with the exception of part of actual trade execution. Proprietary algorithms evaluate investment opportunities regularly in an effort to improve the portfolio“.

All of the above makes a good case for a dynamic factor analysis of RIFF returns.

Read more…

Michael Markov Hedge Funds, Main , , , , ,

Renaissance RIEF April ’09 Performance Puzzle

May 15th, 2009

Back in 2007, we published a research report The Law of Large Numbers with an analysis of the Renaissance Technologies RIEF fund and showed how a similar strategy would have performed during previous recessions and major market downturns. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the RIEF has lost about 17% through April and 8-9% in April alone as it was reported by The Wall Street Journal and various blogs. Read more…

Michael Markov Hedge Funds, Main, Research , , , , ,