That is not what Simons did to make Renaissance Technologies successful. Simons cultivated domain knowledge long before he started a hedge fund, because he had an interest in trading and gambling even as a professor. He also hired people with financial experience.

The historical record overlooks the people he hired who knew a thing or two about trading, while fixating on the team of NLP scientists he hired from IBM. Likewise Simons wasn't initially successful in the very, very early years. It wasn't until the late 80s that the Medallion firm really came into its own.

Yes, I understand that the "financial naiveness" so to speak of RenTec is overplayed in the media, but my point is that superior domain knowledge wasn't what enables Medallion to win. And to be fair, most of the early years were before systematized quant trading.