Could somebody explain why so much effort is being put into quant strategies, when it seems that real-world information gathering would be a much easier way to gain an edge over others? Let’s say you pay to place a camera on a building next to a given company’s factory, and use analysis software to count the number of trucks coming and going from the factory to predict their order flow and earnings. This kind of thing is harder to scale up, but also gives an edge because not everyone else is doing it.
In an age when all hedge funds have the resources to hire the best and brightest engineers and buy the fastest processing hardware, it seems that none of them will have an edge if they are all starting with the same publicly available data.
In an age when all hedge funds have the resources to hire the best and brightest engineers and buy the fastest processing hardware, it seems that none of them will have an edge if they are all starting with the same publicly available data.