MURUGAVEL

 Part 2.5 covered why Simons never hired a single trader — the belief that financial "intuition" often does more harm than good, and that people trained to find genuine signal in noisy scientific data made better researchers than people trained to explain markets after the fact. This part revisits that philosophy through a different lens: what happened when other firms tried to copy the hiring model directly, and why simply hiring physicists doesn't automatically reproduce what Renaissance built. A Philosophy That Looked Easy to Copy On paper, the hiring lesson seems straightforward enough to replicate: go hire mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists instead of MBAs and traders, and you'll get a Renaissance-style research culture. Following this logic, a number of firms over the following decades did exactly that — building teams heavy with PhDs from adjacent scientific fields, explicitly citing Renaissance as the model they were chasing. Some of these...