At age 30, nothing about Jim Simons suggested he would amass a $24.4 billion fortune.

He had just been fired from his job as a codebreaker at the Department of Defense. He would be divorced soon… and he was about to take a job teaching math at a university that was largely unknown, except maybe for a drug problem on campus.

If there was a silver lining, it was that his new employer—Stony Brook University—was determined to spend big to turn things around.

In addition to Simons, it hired a small army of award-winning mathematicians whom Simons would lead as chair of the school’s math department.

And over time, his team made a name for itself in the world of academia.

In 1974, Simons and another professor published a paper, the Chern-Simons theory, that would have applications in fields from physics, to string theory, and even something called “supergravity.”

But Simons was restless. It was one thing to publish papers—even groundbreaking ones in academia. But his friends and coworkers always felt Simons wanted to have an impact on the world.

And one day, when a coworker introduced him to the world of commodities trading—and a lightning quick 10x gain from a bet on sugar prices—Simons was hooked.

He knew that countless people had been burned trying to create systems that predicted the market’s next moves. But he was up for the challenge… He raided Stony Brook’s math department, poaching some of the world-class mathematicians he had helped recruit 10 years ago. And he worked with them to build a fund that was run by mathematicians, rather than MBA types.

Launching in 1982, his fund—Renaissance Technologies—used machine learning to test out relationships between stock prices.

For a detailed account of the inside story behind his legendary fund, I encourage you to check out “The Man Who Solved the Markets: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution” by Gregory Zuckerman.

It’s a story of grit, intrigue, and betrayal once Simons had reached the top of the investing world. In fact, several of Simons’ former mathematician colleagues condemned him, saying he had corrupted a noble calling to use math to stack the trading deck unfairly in his favor.

Unfair? Maybe. But there was no arguing with his results…

Renaissance Technologies achieved an average annual return of 62% from 1988-2021.

That’s enough to turn every $1 invested in 1988 into $8,203,430.

For context, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has returned an average of 19.8% a year since its 1965 inception.

Now, we’re not affiliated with Renaissance Technologies. And there may never be another Jim Simons. But what this story proves is that technical indicators, and reams of financial information, can be used to gain a huge edge in markets.

In fact, after two decades studying the markets and fine-tuning my approach, I have my own formula to detect, move on, and finally, to exit profit opportunities.

It’s yielded an 83% win rate—for context, professional traders strive to be right 55% of the time.

Of course, it’s not perfect… no one has ever removed risk from investing, and no one ever will.