I think there's a second, much more complicated problem looming on the horizon. Big quant, data-driven hedge funds are able to make sense of public data in ways

I think there's a second, much more complicated problem looming on the horizon. Big quant, data-driven hedge funds are able to make sense of public data in ways that retail investors, and even old-school institutional investors, cannot. I'm talking about things like predicting crop yields, predicting quarterly revenues, or just seeing complex multivariate trends that others don't. Clearly it's not technically insider trading to trade on your analysis of public data, so it's not really insider trading to tell others (e.g. friends, or "yourself" if you personally trade using information you gleaned from work) about the information. But functionally, it pretty much is insider trading, because you might be the only person in the world with that knowledge. I'm curious to see how quant investing holds up over the future. Currently, retail investing is disadvantaged compared to institutional, but not so much that it's a waste of time altogether. Quant strategies will widen the gap. Hopefully average people will have the ability to invest in quant funds so they don't get left in the dust.