The venture capital world might be instructive for this question. VCs universally refuse to sign an NDA with any entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs routinely share what they believe to be unique, billion dollar ideas with VCs, sometimes dozens of VCs before they get one to invest in them. There are a ton of success stories from folks who took the leap of faith and effectively "gave away" their IP in this manner. There's not a lot of success stories from those who were paranoid of their one good idea being stolen by a VC and as a result never got funding. Of course not all successful firms are VC backed, but by and large the successful non-VC backed firms didn't end up that way because of paranoia and the fact they kept their golden goose secret from the funding source they needed for success. Basically if you want backing from someone you have to weigh the potential upside of that with the potential risk of them both stealing your idea and that theft impacting your future profits. If you have spent years and only have the one successful strategy, and it's a very low capacity play where anyone else doing the same thing arbs it away....then you're probably best keeping it to yourself. After all if it's really low capacity you don't get much benefit from outside capital anyway. If your edge is your ability to find edges, then you're in a much better place both from an IP standpoint and trading in general standpoint. If you can also benefit from the extra capital, then really going with any reputable firm is a no brainier. Worst case they steal an edge and you abandon it and go with the next one, same as you're forced to do when market conditions change or you arb yourself out of an edge. Any other case, you see significant benefit on the upside.