Perhaps the most important paragraph in the article: "Everyone is competing against everyone else. If one firm succeeds in making the market more efficient thro

Perhaps the most important paragraph in the article: "Everyone is competing against everyone else. If one firm succeeds in making the market more efficient through quantitative techniques, then there’s less money left over for other people to make exceptional investment returns. There will be one or two firms that are good at innovation and recognizing things that other people haven’t recognized. But everyone else will be fighting over scraps." The market is, in theory, not a zero sum game. Algorithmic systems, in practice, are. In theory the only way you can genuinely beat the market is when you find an inefficiency in it. And inefficiencies are generally based on a lack of knowledge. If everybody knows what you know, that inefficiency will no longer exist. And now pair this with the reality that most (and it's probably safe to say all) algorithmic systems are not really especially complex. That doesn't mean they're easy to make though. The 'secret sauce' is in exactly what data is used, how the pieces you have interoperate, the way inputs and outputs are massaged, and so on. But this drives a huge need for secrecy. Nobody who is successful is going to want to talk about how their system is designed largely because most would not be especially difficult to replicate if they provided more than very abstract details.