Oh and dont believe those wall of text writing schizo posters who are developing a "Proprietary trading system" or something along those lines i have never seen anything which gives consistent result in the long term or even short term

i disagree with none of this but i feel like jim simons remains a living exception to the rule with regards to profitable prop systems.

also the case can be made that HFT, at least the most widely adapted versions (dark pool front running systems) are really not exactly trading at all.

well jim simons invented good clean data driven quantitative investing and was years ahead of its competition until they caught up to them and are now doing exactly the same thing, some on a larger scale others on a smaller, but its not like he invented a system which consistently prints money while running alone one mainframe for 27 years. And in a nutshell this is the wet dream of any "inventor" for a prop system, let it run alone and never look back

and yea HFT is also in my eyes just a huge market manipulation system

something that really makes me scratch my head about renaissance... one of the defining differences between them and the other big hedge fish is that they eat the 15% tax hit for intra-year swing positions, which in theory makes them particularly well positioned to pursue dynamic, fluid responses to rapid market condition changes.

so why/how did they get their hand stuck in the cookie jar during q1/q2 this year?

i hear they recovered nicely but its still a curious thing... the only thing i can imagine is that they decided not to depart from their 'never overrule the computer' doctrine and got black swanned...

on a very related note, this thread popped up on reddit about 10 years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/commen...tent=post_body

pairs well with your comment regarding set-it-and-forget-it systems.