You have one fund that is an extreme outlier in performance over decades (!!) that nobody can explain and yet 'financial experts' aren't stumped and are 'pretty sure it's real'?

Yeah, those useless academics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...

any successful academic in economics making money in the stock market? Or I am missing something? Maybe a Nobel winner from Chicago?

I don't know what that "in economics" condition is there for. I expect there are plenty of economics professors doing very nicely in the stock market, but it tends to be mathematicians and physicists who found hedge funds.

Successful academics who have done that and made shedloads of money in the stock market would include, er, Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, the very firm under discussion in this thread.

The thing that got acquired by Renaissance and turned into the Medallion Fund was called Axcom. That was founded by a guy called James Ax, who before he founded that was ... a mathematics professor at Cornell, Harvard, and Stony Brook.

Another key guy at Axcom was Elwyn Berlekamp. He was a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley.

So it doesn't seem like there's any incompatibility between being an academic and being very, very good at extracting money from the stock market.

The author of the study was not a math professor, so your example is not relevant to my comment...

No, for the same reasons the soldier pressing the button at a nuclear test doesn't get the Nobel Prize for doing so.

like the reasons for Nobel for Fama for the wrong theory...