Three lives and three deaths

Charlie Munger, Daniel Kahneman and Jim Simons. The last few months have seen the deaths of three people whose lives and work are of interest to investors, among others. Of the three, Munger and Kahneman have often been the subject of my writings over the years. However, I have hardly ever mentioned Jim Simons, even though his life has been the most interesting in some ways. By all accounts, Simons, who passed away last week at 86, was an extraordinary genius. During the first half of his life, he was an academic mathematician, or, to be precise, a geometer. Then, around the time he was 40, he decided that the equity markets could be understood and predicted using purely statistical techniques. He set up an investment firm and hired people from various maths and maths-adjacent fields. They struggled for about a decade,