Jim Simons is one of the founders of quantitative trading. He began studying mathematics at MIT at the age of 17 and earned his PhD at the age of 23. He first joined the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) to break Russian codes to help the US government in the Cold War. After the Vietnam War, he wanted a bigger challenge, so he set out to solve one of the toughest challenges in history, the marketplace. It took him and his colleagues more than 10 years to create a secret and complex model that could find tricky patterns in the market and make billions of dollars.

Here are the main conclusions I have drawn from Jim’s philosophy that can help you too to achieve exceptional results:

Focus on the odds

Most investors would rather have a 99% chance of making $1 than a 1% chance of making $100.

Jim became obsessed with the odds he had of beating the market. It was the first time in history that anyone had used probability and statistical models to trade, which has many advant…