Over time it has become clear to me that one of the most powerful skills a professional can develop is intuition. What prompted this was a short clip of Jim Simons being asked about alpha and the growing difficulty of generating it, given how many quantitative funds and PhDs now compete for it. At first glance his explanation seems simple. He defines alpha and talks about the Medallion fund. Straightforward. I watched it about twenty times. There was something underneath it, and that sense — that there is something here and you should pay attention — is the part I actually want to talk about. What I extracted may not generalise to anyone else, and that is fine. The point is not my conclusions. The point is the effort of developing your own. For what it is worth, my takeaways were secondary to that: Calmness. He begins answering with a strange serenity, the kind that belongs to someone who has faced and solved a very large number of problems. It is the tranquility of a person willing to take all the time necessary to decide, who would then not hesitate for a second once the moment came. Time. The list of the best investors does not begin with recent years. Excellence takes time, which puts the proliferation of new quantitative funds in perspective. The margins are narrow. Remove the very best performers from any ranking and the averages move less than you would expect. When it comes to excellence, the distances at the top are small and hard-won. Invest in your intuition. It compounds.