Also -- if I were a quant that managed to beat the market consistently, I would shut up and go straight to RT, for two reasons. To avoid toxic dubious comments like yours, and because RT can pay me better than your standard hedge fund.

http://www.reuters.com/article/simons-hedge-idUSN21355752200...

The challenge is that those patterns appear and then they disappear mostly forever because they are frequently created by someone else's mistakes like Nassim Taleb buying way out of the money put options that never really created any significant profit. Free Alpha, get your free Alpha, right there.

To tap into those patterns while they are profitable, you need a lot of smart people, and a great deal of infrastructure for experimentation and delivery of strategies that can tap into those patterns before they disappear. While you're right that it is possible that they cheat, it's also possible that they have a sufficiently sophisticated infrastructure to actually make this work. It's kind of like how Nintendo only ships 1 out of 3 video games they develop. All IMO of course.

Consistently beating the market would indeed be an extraordinary claim, because we havent seen that a lot (if at all).

I don't have to "back up my claim" the math does it for me already! You're asking me to prove a negative--instead, show me one example of a firm that has beaten the market without resorting to funny business and I'm all ears.