For all the gains, few outside the office shared the same regard for the group’s approach. When Berlekamp explained his firm’s methods to business students on Berkeley’s campus, some mocked him. “We were viewed as flakes with ridiculous ideas,” Berlekamp says. Fellow professors were polite enough not to share their criticism and skepticism, at least within earshot. But Berlekamp knew what they were thinking. “Colleagues avoided or evaded commenting,” he says.
Over and over throughout this book there are many instances of how success never was really obvious. Nowadays the fund is one of the most successful ever but back then it was far from obvious that they were making any real headway - most believed it was a curious idea but wouldn’t unseat the “professional” bankers and traders who would make most of the money forever
Berlekamp told Simons he was unsure what to do. Simons couldn’t understand his indecision. “Elwyn, when you smell smoke, you get the hell out!” Simons told him. Straus closed the brokerage account and shifted their trades elsewhere. Months later, Mahlmann resigned from Stotler and the Chicago Board of Trade; two days later, Stotler filed for bankruptcy. Eventually, regulators charged the firm with fraud. Simons and his firm had narrowly escaped a likely death blow.
Another quote is this one where they got caught in a near miss of the collapse of Stotler Group, a trading firm they did a lot of business with. If the didn’t move their trades, they probably would have had a lot of positions caught up which would have been a deadly blow to a small firm (at the time).
In both cases you could say they got lucky but being in the position in the first place to try the “ridiculous ideas” or “smell smoke” I would argue aren’t luck. More it shows for businesses to succeed you need a lot of things to go right and to be more than a little lucky but in either case the position you put yourself in lends itself to the outcome a lot. What I’m trying to say is it is not the cards you’re dealt that matters, but how you play them. Many others would have given up on these crazy ideas from the social pressure or would have refused to believe the stories of a firm going under and waited to see.