While we don't know the precise details of the algorithm publicly, I am fairly sure that at least one or two former quants from RenTec have gone on to work for

While we don't know the precise details of the algorithm publicly, I am fairly sure that at least one or two former quants from RenTec have gone on to work for other funds. They carried their knowledge with them. It is extremely unlikely that no one in the entire history of the firm hasn't left the firm to go to work for a competitor. For example, Simons' son started two funds with an ex-RenTec employee, who is also his spouse. One is a VC fund, the other is... some sort of hedge fund? I don't know, https://www.meritagegroup.com/ https://www.meritagegroup.com/ but it seems to be doing well, https://hedgefollow.com/funds/Meritage+Group https://hedgefollow.com/funds/Meritage+Group We also have examples from funds like 2σ, where, > In February 2014, Forbes reported that former Two Sigma employee Kang Gao, aged 29, was prosecuted by the Manhattan District Attorney and is accused of using a remote-access device to view Two Sigma's proprietary trading models and emailing this information to his personal email account, lifting quantitative trading strategies, trading models, a marketing presentation, and a scientific white paper.[11] The case, New York. v. Kang Gao, led to Gao receiving 8 months in jail as of October 2014.[11] In February 2015, Gao pleaded guilty to "illegally accessing and duplicating proprietary and confidential information related to the firm's trading methods."[12][13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Sigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Sigma There's also D.E. Shaw, another extremely successful fund. A sufficiently clever mathematician with a former RenTec employee should be able to figure out the basics of their strategy, and a smart enough team is likely to be able to re-create large parts of it, albeit at a disadvantage as Simons has stated that they have large amounts of proprietary data. edit - there's also a book on them that goes into the trading strategy at 30,000 foot level of detail, https://medium.com/ml-everything/how-renaissance-technologies-solved-the-market-part-1-2814eb271dc3 https://medium.com/ml-everything/how-renaissance-technologie... Please note, the point I have made isn't that the public would come to know, but that experts and people in the fields will start to figure out that something is going on, and then they'll eventually piece it together. After which point, it will come into the public domain, allowing us all to know more. Also, RenTec itself is an example of "forbidden knowledge" entering the broader domain. He worked for the NSA in some capacity, and later took is knowledge of cryptanalysis and applied some of the ideas to trading. What ideas and how we don't know yet, but the derivative knowledge from the work he did for the NSA ended up making RenTec