Codebreaker Makes $2.8B in a Year

For Hettinga's nose coke blowing about the virtues of coding: New York Times reports today: "James H. Simons, a mathematician and former Defense Department code breaker who uses complex computer models to trade, earned $2.8 billion. His flagship Medallion fund returned 73 percent." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16wall.html What could NSA do in the market with its acres of computers and thousands of cryptologists? To be sure, Simons might just be stealing data in the NSA way and covering it up with the tall tale. Financial cryptography is not be trusted.