Jim Simons Might Have $150 Mill To Offer SUNY Stoney Brook Or He Might Not

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You want it, Albany? You know what you have to do. Otherwise Long Island gets its first tobacco farm.

In a rare interview, Mr. Simons seemed eager to talk about SUNY and acknowledged that he was considering a major gift [of potentially $150 million] to Stony Brook. He hoped to help raise even more for the campus in the future. “We’re not prepared at the moment to state any particular number, but it will be an attractive gift,” said Mr. Simons, who is also chairman emeritus of Stony Brook’s affiliated foundation. “Over time it could become an even more attractive gift.” But Mr. Simons and school officials said that in order to raise more private money, SUNY units first needed to win independence from the ebb and flow of Albany’s annual budget process, which in recent years ended with significant cuts in state aid to higher education. Mr. Paterson’s plan would allow each campus to raise tuition each year and use that additional revenue as school officials see fit, providing some stability to the schools’ general operating budgets from year to year.

SUNY Donor Links Bigger Gift To Tuition Flexibility [NYT]

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Hedge Funds

This Is A Story About A Guy Telling A Random Dude On The Street "I'm actually building a hedge fund that uses quantitative strategies to pick stocks" And That Dude Actually Being Jim Simons

Something we've long-maintained around the Dealbreaker office is that hedge fund manager Jim Simons would make a great fairy godmother, what with his soothing voice, white beard, and the fact that he's really just a lovable math teacher who happened to make a zillion dollars by tinkering away the computers in his garage and would be happy to lend the powers of his magic cigarette wand to those in need.  So we were extremely pleased to have our attention brought to an anecdote from Scott Patterson's Dark Pools, in which Simons seems to appear out of nowhere, just like a FGM would, sprinkles unexpected gifts on a young man and woman (of both hope* and nicotine), and then disappears as quickly as he came via golden carriage. (We also appreciate that Simons is the kind of FGM that will laugh in your face as you explain to him what a quant fund is, not realizing he's got some experience there.) One day in the summer of 2006, Fleiss was having lunch outdoors with his girlfriend at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. As they chatted in the sun after their meal, an elderly man dressed in a modest suit walked out of the restaurant and lit up a cigarette. Fleiss's girlfriend bummed a smoke off him, and they began to chat. "So what do you do?" he asked Fleiss. "I'm actually building a hedge fund that uses quantitative strategies to pick stocks," he said. "Oh really?" The man laughed. "Where did you go to school?" "Amherst." "Good school. You know, I'm also in the quant biz." Fleiss asked where he worked, but the man wouldn't answer. But Fleiss kept pushing. Finally, the man said he ran a fund called Renaissance Technologies. Fleiss nearly fell out of his chair. He wanted to talk more, but a gleaming Bentley had just pulled to the curb and Jim Simons quickly disappeared into it. Dark Pools [Scott Patterson] Related: Who Wants to Become A Rebellion Research Investor? *That some of his quant-i-ness would rub off on the guy.