Comment by 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
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.