Renaissance hit with $ 5 billion in repayments since December 1

Photographer: Amanda Gordon / Bloomberg

Renaissance Technologies, the investment giant that just posted its worst-ever returns on its public funds, has been hit with at least $ 5 billion in repayments.

Clients took net $ 1.85 billion from the three hedge funds in December and demanded $ 1.9 billion net in January, according to investor letters seen by Bloomberg. Investors are poised to snatch another $ 1.65 billion this month, the letters show.

Those numbers can be offset if there is an inflow in February or if investors decide to reverse one of their buyback requests.

Billionaire Jim Simons, a quantitative investment pioneer, has had a difficult year in his business. The three public hedge funds posted double-digit losses in 2020 as their algorithms were thrown out by market swings the computers had never seen before. At the same time, the fund is for employees and insiders up 76% last year, Institutional Investor reported.

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Renaissance’s Institutional Equities fund, the largest of the outside vehicles, lost 19% in 2020, the letters show. That fund received most of the repayments. The Institutional Diversified Alpha Fund fell 32% and the Institutional Diversified Global Equities Fund fell 31%.

A spokesperson for the East Setauket, New York-based company declined to comment.

Renaissance told clients in a September letter that her losses were due to covered during the March collapse and then covered in the recovery from April through June. That happened because his trading models “overcompensated” the original problems.

Renaissance spoke again of his bleak numbers in a December letter.

“While the recent performance was terrible and would have suggested worse than previous performance, it was likely for 2020,” the company said, expecting the model “that in track records as long as ours, some risk-return ratios are just as bad as those. We see now are not shocking. ”The broader lesson is that“ one can expect even good investments to perform terribly from time to time. ”

Renaissance is the world’s largest quantitative hedge fund company. It was founded in 1982 by Simons, a former code breaker for the National Security Agency. Last month, he announced that he is stepping down as chairman of the company, which at the time managed approximately $ 60 billion. He remains a board member.