The most important thing is to find a strategy that's genuinely profitable and not just profitable in your data set.
We try to hire people who are smart enough and creative enough to find things that nobody else has found.
I don't have any single investment philosophy. The whole point is that we're trying to find things that work.
The challenge with any quantitative strategy is that the more successful it becomes, the more people pile in, and eventually the edge gets arbitraged away.
Science, at its best, is about finding the truth. That's what I find compelling about both computational finance and computational biology — they're both attempts to find real patterns in complex systems.
Modeling the behavior of proteins is probably the hardest computational problem I've ever worked on. Markets are complicated, but biology is genuinely terrifying in its complexity.