Positives:
1. Wages gained 2.2% year over year as Unemployment fell to 5.1%
2. Productivity rose 3.3%, better than the 3.2% expected and up from 1.3% previously.
3. ADP employment came in at 190k, up from 177k previously.
4. August vehicle sales totaled 17.72mm SAAR, about 400k more than expected, up from 17.46mm and the best level since August ’05
5. Construction spending increased 0.7%, in line with expectations.
6. Chicago PMI came in at 54.4, down from 54.7 but still a solid number; Markit PMI came in at 32, up from 52.9 previously.
7. ISM nonmanufacturing came in at 59, better than the 58 expected
Negatives:
1. Major U.S. indices lose 3% for the week, with S&P500 losing 3.4%, Dow Industrials 3.25%, and Nasdaq off 2.99%
2. At 173k new jobs in August, NFP disappoints below consensus;
3. Weekly jobless claims rose to 282k, up from 270k previously.
4. Factory orders rose 0.4%, down from the 2.2.% previously and below the 1% expected rise;
5. Netflix loses 16% for the week, now off 20% from its highs, now officially in a bear market
6. Emerging markets suffer similar selloffs.
The Great Jim Simons | The Irrelevant Investor

The Great Jim Simons
ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2015 BY MICHAEL BATNICK
I want to share a terrific video of Jim Simons speaking to an audience at MIT. Simons is a mathematician, hedge fund manager and now philanthropist so it’s no wonder that his firm is called Renaissance Technologies. In this talk, Simons shares stories about riding a scooter from Boston to Bogota, getting fired from the Institute for Defense Analyses, and the success of Renaissance Technologies. Without spoiling too much of it, here is one bit that I really enjoyed.
In 1976 at age 38, he left the math department at Stony Brook to manage money professionally. Simons says:
“Lenny seemed to get less and less interested with the models and more interested in reading the news reel. In those days it was just a role that would tick away. Lenny was more interested in reading the news than thinking about models. And then he started having opinions on what was gonna go up and what was gonna go down. This was all foreign currencies, bonds that kind of stuff. And I started listening to him, he was right, he was right. He was right enough times I said okay the hell with the modeling. Let’s just try to make some money. We had a remarkable run, in two years since I said the hell with the model we multiplied our investor’s money by twelve, even after their fees. We were incredibly lucky.”

Watch it all here.
 James Simons - Mathematics, Common Sense, and Good Luck: My Life and Careers -