Well said. Where most funds have the same problem 'chollida1 describes here[1], Rentec (and other similar firms) moved past that by establishing the right culture and investing in the right technology from the outset.
They need smart people, but hiring the smartest people and having the most sophisticated models won't do you any good if you can't acquire high signal data, can't clean that data properly and can't rapidly backtest. And if you can't do any of that, adding more data is just going to add more noise.
_____________________