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The hedge fund featured in Billions is entirely unlike typical quant trading firms in culture and operation, let alone RenTech.

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It seemed that all hedge funds in Billions were trading in insider information. It does seem prevalent, but I am not personally in the industry at all: https://medium.com/@malwarwick_98471/insider-trading-in-the-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_A._Cohen

You can also see them trading on non-public information they get trough other channels. I think that's more normal.

In real life you can't run a fund by finding insiders willing to commit crimes routinely. But you often can get the same information by other means by collecting intelligence. Observing traffic, the flow of materials, following people and finding who meets who.

Yes^. RenTech and lots of other funds routinely source non-financial data to back out nonpublic information. It's not illegal and it's not unique to them. Examples are things like real estate documents, weather data, public activities of executives, satellite imagery, credit card transactions (Second Measure), DNS data, location data (Thasus, Foursquare), etc...

> Observing traffic, the flow of materials, following people and finding who meets who.

IANAL, but I’d imagine that then it’s no longer non-public information (at least in the US).

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