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> Anyone have hard numbers on if/by how much quants outperform old fashioned techniques

From the article, "In the past five years, quant-focused hedge funds gained about 5.1% a year on average. The average hedge fund rose 4.3% a year in the same period."

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Averages are nearly meaningless without standard deviation or at least a histogram.

Meaningless for telling us the distribution of returns across all hedge funds.(It is very likely a Pareto distribution with, or even more skewed, with a small percentage of funds making the majority of returns.)

Interestingly, what these averages do tell us is that the average hedge fund return is not much, if at all, better than the average index fund return, with the index fund return graph being much more uniform in variance.

And without knowing the distribution, we have no idea whether the difference in quant funds vs non-quant funds is distinguishable from zero. Whenever someone tells you the difference between two averages and nothing more, you should assume they are "lying" with statistics.

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