Anyone who worked in quantitative trading knows you can consistently outperform the S&P500/VTI/SPY over 20+ year horizons.

Buy and hold passive US equity index funds gives a Sharpe ratio of ~0.7 with annual return of 8-10%. Meanwhile, high frequency trading does upward of Sharpe 10+ with 40-60% annual return, with 10+ year track records, of course.

Hell, even Citadel hedge fund, after their ridiculous 50% performance fee, returned 19% _after fees_ annually to outside passive investors over 20 years. And this is billions of AUM, so the ”quant don’t scale” argument goes out the window.

Why is nobody talking about this? Because the elite politicians and businessmen invest in these very quant funds, and thus suppress any news or regulation. Sucks for middle class professionals with <$5M net worth.

But before you unleash your automated proprietary model, you should be able to explain why you think you have any edge whatsoever over your far better funded, far more experienced counterparties.

And, no, getting great results from backtesting your model is not evidence of edge in the future against adversaries with access to better data than you have.

RenTech famously tried to understand exact mechanics of their successful models after they (models) proved to be successful. Sometimes they succeeded.

That speaks volumes about your integrity. Good on you!

But it is not true.

The average index fund fails to outperform the S&P.

How many passive index funds are there worldwide? Thousands? How many beat VTI or S&P500? Answer: QQQ and small cap.

> Of those how much can be attributed statistically to skill rather than luck?

If you are picking S&P as your champion, then I am allowed to pick a hedge fund as my champion.

And Citadel outperforms S&P over 20+ year horizon. Citadel 19% vs S&P 10%.

This is a straw man as most people understand investing in indexes as buying a an index that tracks the s&p.

>If you are picking S&P as your champion, then I am allowed to pick a hedge fund as my champion.

You are making a false equivalence. The s&p is a proxy for the us market and therefore is a benchmark. It captures the captures the bets placed by all market participants including citadel.

Citadel does something beyond buying and selling equities to generate that alpha. And it’s likely not just restricted to equities. Nonetheless they are an outlier. Which is the point I was making. Most people won’t do better than the us market in aggregate over a similar stretch of time.

1. SPY shares long/short on margin/leverage

1. SPY options

1. SPX options

1. /ES e-mini futures

1. a blend of all

Does one trump another in popularity?

a lot of technical analysis is done on psychological levels related to (in my opinion) SPY strike prices/SPX strike prices/SPX levels.

Yet, /ES is typically 20 points ahead of SPX. For example, there can be a battle zone of support/resistance at 4900 on SPX, but /ES blew past it a day ago. I wasn't sure if one had more power/prominence than the other.

There is no such thing as support/resistance in reality.

Where would you say 80% of the daily trade volume comes from on average?

The powers to be that I can think of:

institutional investors / fund managers slowly reallocating (selling stuff off, buying stuff) daily

high frequency trading algorithms trading shares back and forth to each other in an artificial way to generate synthetic volume/movement

market makers reacting to option chain volume to remain neutral

"hedge funds" / "quant funds" running their algorithm

what do those algorithms look for at the "minute by minute" scale if not things like support/resistance/patterns/volume?

Your post is completely ridiculous.

Do you have a source?

What sort of shenanigans do you think profitable automated traders are engaged in?

Market rigging

Survivor bias (not shenanigans that one)

Market rigging: the market can be affected by your behaviour without you rigging anything

Survivorship bias: this can be argued for any competitive industry. Don't engage in it unless you're good at it.

> Insider trading: there's a lot of information freely available that can be used to make predictions

The efficient market hypothesis deals with that. The freely available information is priced in (nothing is free, and it takes time)

> Market rigging: the market can be affected by your behaviour without you rigging anything

I am talking of things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forex_scandal. These are incidences where the traders got caught. Given the millions at stake, do you think many are caught?

To win at active trading you need an edge nobody else has. There have been cases of traders having insights not known to others. Pairs trading is the only example I know of. In that case the people who kept it secret made out like bandits for a few years, then the secret leaked and it is no longer profitable

The most common legal edge players have is scale: They are huge and nimble and can take advantage of opportunities at scale. It goes really well, until it does not, and another trading house collapses.

The most common edge I believe, after studying it for a decade, is crime. Big trading house, big crime

it can be done...no one say it is easy, but it's doable

Their other funds can't just do what Medallion does, otherwise you are just increasing the cap of Medallion and thus hurting it, which is why they aren't as successful.

How come they figured it out for one single fund, but aren't able to make any alternative strong strategies except the secret and closed one?

Medallion does not act on its own or any human sentiment. It is a black box trading strategy that looks for signals. It's not aurprise that during downturns, the overall market is incredibly inefficient. Medallion makes money off of the market's inefficiencies. I don't know what that has to donwith internal vs external investors though.

> How come they figured it out for one single fund, but aren't able to make any alternative strong strategies except the secret and closed one?

I dislike responding to a question with a question, but why would that work? Medallion has made several people billionaires and has done so incredibly quickly. Trying to replicate it with the same strategy will just step on its toes.

It helps to understand Medallion. It is a massive statistical trading system that places a huge amount of bets across all markets, like all of them, and hopes to win say 51% of the bets. When it reaches a certain size, they cap it by taking off all money above the cap and returning it to investors. You can't add more money to Medallion and keep its performance up. It moves the market too much and degrades its positions.

My questions are valid, and there might be valid answers. We don't know, because nobody knows how Medallion works. All we know is that nobody else can replicate it, not even RenTech itself. Which makes asking questions very important.

Several firms have done similar things.

That being said, RenTech is indeed very interesting. For all we know, it could be a money laundering operation or something similar to Madoff's structure. Or they are just very very good, or lucky. Time will tell !

fixed it