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Winston Churchill
In 2003, Nat Simons was a portfolio manager at the Long Island-based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. At the time, Renaissance Technologies had stakes in a fund run by Bernie Madoff, and in 2003, Simons emailed colleagues expressing concerns over the possibility that Madoff’s fund was engaged in fraudulent activity. Simons and some colleagues conducted an investigation that seemed to confirm Simons’s suspicions. Despite their findings, Renaissance failed to cut ties with Madoff entirely, opting instead to decrease their stake in the fund by half. Gladwell views this decision as evidence of our bias toward truth and willingness to dismiss doubt.
Nat Simons Quotes in Talking to Strangers
The Talking to Strangers quotes below are all either spoken by Nat Simons or refer to Nat Simons. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4 Quotes
The difference between Markopolos and Renaissance, however, is that Renaissance trusted the system. Madoff was part of one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the entire financial market. If he was really just making things up, wouldn’t one of the many government watchdogs have caught him already? As Nat Simons, the Renaissance executive, said later, “You just assume that someone was paying attention.”
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Nat Simons Character Timeline in Talking to Strangers
The timeline below shows where the character Nat Simons appears in Talking to Strangers. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter Four: The Holy Fool
1. In November 2003, a Long Island-based portfolio manager named Nat Simons emailed his colleagues to express his concerns over a fund in which his hedge fund,...
(full context)
...executive at Renaissance, confirmed that something fishy was going on with Madoff. This prompted Laufer, Simons, and the fund’s risk manager, Paul Proder, to conduct an investigation. Their findings revealed no...
(full context)
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uncovered Simons and Laufer’s email correspondence about Madoff during one of their routine audits. The SEC had...
(full context)
