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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY

2 months ago

Isn't that how RenTech got started?

From what I understand, that fund still does huge gains, and can't get too big.

12 comments

ChrisMarshallNY

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mdorazio  2 months ago

RenTech was founded by legit signals processing guys who cut their teeth breaking codes for the NSA and basically invented ML for the stock market. They also built the best dataset in the world (at the time) for stock info as a competitive advantage. There's no real way to duplicate what they did today when everyone else is already doing quant trades to take advantage of suckers.

Note: There's a great podcast on RenTech by Acquired: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/renaissance-technologies

  • matwood  2 months ago

    There's also a great book: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...

    They lost money for a long time, and it was not easy building what they built. I really enjoyed the early parts where they were solving problems in creative ways like any startup. For example, they needed data so had people calling them each day reading off numbers and someone writing them to down to enter them later.

    How the later part of the story ties to today's politics is also interesting.

bongodongobob  2 months ago

If the gains are huge, it's either temporary luck or they're cheating. You cannot have long term high alpha without either. If you meet a person who can constantly flip a coin heads side up, ask them to keep going and they'll either fail or you'll find the coin is rigged.

  • anon7725  2 months ago

    “It’s impossible for me to beat the market consistently” does not imply “nobody can beat the market consistently” or “nobody can beat the market consistently for a long enough time to become filthy rich”.

    • caminante  2 months ago

      The N=1 or handful of people that are your exception kind of prove the rule.

      Here's the thing...if you want to be pedantic, you need to explain how someone persists such alpha over time with examples. Not easy.

      edit: See my note below on RenTech.

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