good traders other than Adam Heathcote

James Harris "Jim" Simons is a mathematician, academic, trader, and philanthropist.

For over two decades, Simons' Renaissance Technologies' hedge funds, which trade in markets around the world, have employed complex mathematical models to analyze and execute trades—many of them automated. Renaissance uses computer-based models to predict price changes in easily-traded financial instruments. These models are based on analyzing as much data as can be gathered, then looking for non-random movements to make predictions.

In 1982, Simons founded Renaissance Technologies Corporation, a private investment firm based in New York with over $20 billion under management; Simons is CEO, of what is now one of the world's most successful hedge funds. Simons earned an estimated $2.5 billion in 2008, $2.8 billion in 2007, $1.7 billion in 2006, $1.5 billion in 2005, (the largest compensation among hedge fund managers that year) and $670 million in 2004. With an estimated current^[update] net worth of around $5.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 55th-richest person in America. He was named by the Financial Times in 2006 as the "smartest" billionaire.

Simons lives with his wife in Manhattan and Long Island, and is the father of three.

In 1976, Simons won the American Mathematical Society's Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, for work that involved a recasting of the subject of area minimizing multi-dimensional surfaces and characteristic forms..

In 1978, he left academia to run an investment fund that traded in commodities and financial instruments on a discretionary basis.

Renaissance employs many specialists with non-financial backgrounds, including mathematicians, physicists and statisticians. The firm's latest fund, the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF), is designed to handle upwards of $100 billion. RIEF has historically trailed the firm's more well-known Medallion fund, a separate fund that only contains the personal money of the firm's executives

In 2006 Simons was named Financial Engineer of the Year by the International Association of Financial Engineers. In 2007 he was estimated to have personally earned $1.7bn.

In a statement released to shareholders, the fund announced it had sustained losses of up to 7% in the wake of the 2007 Subprime mortgage financial crisis but managed to end the month of August with a positive performance of +0.7%