The hedge fund empire founded by billionaire Jim Simons has taken a bit of a beating as the coronavirus pandemic rattles stocks, The Post has learned.
As of Friday, two funds run by Simons’ Renaissance Technologies hedge fund firm posted double-digit losses for the year, sources said.
The Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund was down 17 percent as of Friday — compared to a 24 percent drop in the Dow Jones industrial average — while the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha lost 13 percent in the same period, sources said.
Simons, 82, was a mathematician when he founded RenTech in 1982 and is still revered on Wall Street for the Medallion fund, which is open only to current and former employees and has reportedly boasted double-digit annual returns, net of fees, for decades.
He retired in 2010 but still profits from the funds and is worth an estimated $21.6 billion. It’s an arrangement that regularly places Simon on Institutional Investor’s list of richest hedge fund managers, including its 2019 list released last week.
RenTech manages $130 billion in assets, according to filings.
Hedge funds generally have taken it under the chin as the coronavirus pandemic raises fears of a global recession, knocking down even powerful quant funds.
“A lot of quant funds got hammered in this because there is no pattern to this,” one macro trader told The Post.
“The guys who bounced covered their losses, used different strategies,” this person said. “RenTech only does quant.”
