The book may shed some light on it, but I’d assume each of their researchers is responsible for and maintains a few algos/strategies, which run on an advanced platform/code maintained by developers. So you’d have to steal their code and then setup a larger team of capable yet corrupt scientists to maintain stolen code and thousands of stolen algos.
I've heard they have strict NDA's and non-competes that they are willing to enforce for example like with pavel/alexander although that took place in 2003. Supposedly a job at rentec is the last job in finance you'll have but you'll get paid for it... I've worked in the industry for going on 15 years now and I get a lot of resumes from headhunters including from practically every top tier quant fund at some point but have never seen one from rentec, granted if someone had rentec on the resume they wouldn't be on the market for long it is in the public domain that they've been capturing and storing data effectively since inception and so likely have the largest/best data set in the industry last thing I've heard through the grapevine... they were totally ahead of the curve on machine learning and multiperiod optimization which while common place now would have been a huge advantage to be a first mover on, at least my backtests show that, really wish was doing it 10-15 years ago... oh well
Definitely, part of the reason for hiring computer scientists, etc with no prior financial industry experience is so they could force them to uphold their confidentiality agreements—not easy to do based on an idea when that person already has an interest in trading. The agreement probably stated they could never trade or work for a company that trades ever again. Professionals that have worked in the industry have cozy relationships with others that have worked in the industry also—the boys club mentality. You don't know who you can trust. Highlights the difficulty in building a successful hedge fund—it's not just coming up with profitable strategies. The barriers to entry are significant.
Just got it as well. Looking forward to listening. Just finished my first few Audio books. Wonder why I never liked the concept before. Btw, fantastic read by Yuval Harari, “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”.
This is actually my first audio book ever. I just have so many unread books piled up, I realized I won't read this book either unless it just plays in the background. Already getting used to it. I may also replay it couple times to get the essence.