The Medallion Fund for Strategic Decisions

In 1988, a mathematician named Jim Simons looked at Wall Street's most prestigious analysts — the best-compensated, most confident, most expensively educated people in American finance — and saw something nobody else dared to articulate. They were guessing. Expensively, confidently, with excellent suits and corner offices at Goldman Sachs. But guessing.

Renaissance Technologies' Medallion Fund then proceeded to generate 66% average annual returns before fees for the next three decades. The analysts are still there. Still guessing. Still expensive. But the argument is over.

The fundamental Renaissance argument was not that their analysts were smarter. It was that human judgment, intuition, and pattern recognition — the very things Goldman Sachs charged a fortune for — were systematically inferior to quantitative signal processing at scale. They didn't compete on prestige. They competed on a different definition of what "smart" means.

The result was that Renaissance didn't just outperform. They made every fund that relied on analyst intuition look epistemically primitive. Not worse — primitive. That's a categorically different kind of attack. You can recover from "worse." You cannot recover from "primitive." Worse is a competitive gap. Primitive is an extinction event.

The consulting industry in 2026

Strategy consulting in 2026 is Wall Street in 1987. The suits are excellent. The confidence is high. The PowerPoints are thick. And underneath it all: junior analysts with frameworks, pattern-matching on past engagements, and a brand name that makes the guess feel like certainty.

Here is what happens when McKinsey sends a team to advise on a strategic question. They deploy six to twelve people, most of them in their twenties, who will spend weeks reconstructing knowledge that already exists in the client's organization — but in a format the C-suite is trained to trust. The intellectual content of a McKinsey engagement is a structured guess dressed in a framework that the firm has used before. The value is not the analysis. The value is the brand's permission to act on the analysis.

This is not a critique. It is a diagnosis. And the diagnosis has a name: epistemic pre-modernity. The consulting industry operates on the assumption that human pattern-matching, constrained by frameworks and validated by prestige, is the best available method for navigating strategic uncertainty. This was a reasonable assumption in 1990. It is an indefensible one in 2026.

What comes after the guess

What Simons understood — and what the consulting industry has not yet internalized — is that the shift from qualitative judgment to quantitative signal processing is not an incremental improvement. It is a phase transition. The old method doesn't become slightly less useful. It becomes categorically illegitimate.

We built ogram on this premise. Not "we're better than McKinsey." That framing accepts their terms. The correct framing is: McKinsey's entire operating model is epistemically pre-modern. Their methodology was designed for an era when structured human judgment was the best available technology for navigating complexity. That era is over.

ogram is the Medallion Fund for strategic decisions. We don't compete on prestige. We compete on a different definition of what intelligence means.

The intelligence ogram produces is not a better version of a consultant's recommendation. It is a different epistemic object entirely. Where a consulting engagement produces a narrative supported by selectively assembled evidence, ogram produces signal — quantitative, continuous, and falsifiable. Where McKinsey offers a framework that worked on a previous engagement, ogram offers a model that updates in real time against incoming data.

The implications of this shift are not subtle. A partner at a top law firm does not need a 200-slide deck explaining why they should restructure their advisory practice. They need a system that tells them, with calibrated confidence, which restructuring pathway produces the best outcome given their specific constraints, their specific jurisdiction, their specific competitive position — updated continuously as conditions change.

The permission problem

The most interesting thing about the McKinsey model is that its clients already know the answer most of the time. The engagement exists to provide institutional permission to act. The brand provides cover. The deck provides the paper trail. The recommendation provides the plausible deniability.

This is the deepest vulnerability in the consulting model. It is not selling insight. It is selling permission. And permission is a function of trust. When the epistemic basis of that trust shifts — when quantitative intelligence becomes more trustworthy than human judgment — the entire permission structure collapses.

We are building the infrastructure for that collapse. Not aggressively — methodically. The same way Simons did it: by being so consistently right that the question stops being "should we use this?" and starts being "how did we ever operate without it?"

The analysts at Goldman Sachs are still there. They still publish research. They still appear on CNBC. But nobody with serious capital allocates based on their conviction anymore. The same future awaits the strategy consulting industry. The suits will remain excellent. The confidence will remain high. But the clients — the ones with real decisions at stake — will have moved on.