I got the feeling this was more of a case of "I did all this work for myself. Nothing useful came up, so here's what I found." The author may be ok with spending an hour sharing the findings, but doesn't want to spend more time than that.

Which honestly feels like a reasonable position. Though the untrusting, conspiracy-minded part of my brain wonders if I did review 130 different research papers and found 1 that worked if I'd keep it a secret and just tell the world that they were all crap.

Maybe he could work with someone else to get it to a publication stage? It's super interesting, and combats a well-known problem that you get a lot more out of publishing positive cases (we found a correlation) vs negative cases (we found no correlation), although they're both valuable knowledge.

Look, I know writing stuff up sucks. But it could be a great opportunity to learn a lot of things from a very knowledgable person. With the right prof, it could be a great undergrad project.

>Nothing useful came up,

Except plenty useful came up. "Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected" out of 130+ is a significant result. The media would jump on this, and they just might even without any proof of work.

I was referring to the word "useful" within the context of the author's hypothetical goal, not the parent poster's (i.e. a strategy useful for making money opposed to sharing knowledge).

Which is mildly interesting, but not something other people should use for investment decisions.

I use the "everything is at least 10x greater on the internet" rule.