>A quant trader analyzes real world events, both inside and outside the market, to predict stock prices. This is a proven and successful strategy, and in some w

>A quant trader analyzes real world events, both inside and outside the market, to predict stock prices. This is a proven and successful strategy, and in some ways it is essentially automating what people already do with fundamental analysis, just getting an edge by being faster. You're being very loose with language here, to the extent that your entire point is suffering. Systematic Market Trading (the sole strategy of the RenTech and Two Sigma's of the world) is almost exclusively trading on systematic market data that is largely neutral to the underlying tickers. Sure, they'll do some Alpha Factor modeling in some trades, but look at the CV's of the people that work at those shops and you'll see people talking about modeling momentum, crowding, pairs, etc. Speed matters in the sense that you're operating in an adversarial market, but plenty of quants just have better ideas (I think you're confusing market-making HFT with quant - they're related but separate things) Fundamental analysis is a completely different ballgame where the ticker does matter. These are the Citadel Equities, Tiger, Coautes, etc. of the world that emphasize the value of a human stock picker over all else (they have small quant trade execution teams, but it's a rounding error in terms of headcount). >Technical analysis involves looking at a single data point – the past price and volume of a stock – and making a future projection. If this is how you define TA, then sure, that's not what Systematic Trading is, but that's not how most people define TA (The most common example of TA is a form of momentum trading). >When a company releases an earnings report a quant algorithm will analyze it and make trades before you can even click on the link. A technical analyst deems the earnings report useless information. Where the stock will go depends on how it has traded for the last 3 years. This is a gross mischaracterization. Some quants do NLP and sentiment analysis, but that is a small part of the landscape.