I’ll link to the Wikipedia page below for the math, but these figures would highly suggest that their returns are much less likely the result of luck, and more likely the result of some edge/alpha generation.
They're famous because Medallion is the best performing quant fund. Even if quant funds were just chumps tossing coins, if you pick the best of a number of them, you'll get something that looks good.
Now that maths still doesn't stack up that they were just lucky - they probably had skill too. But I think it's more likely that they had a modest edge and were lucky than it is that they had a large edge and got an average result.
Luck means making big returns, skill means doing it with low volatility and high Sharpe.
For example, you might make a (successful) bet that works only in a low-volatility environment; if it works, your ex post Sharpe ratio will look ingenious.
But, if a given fund (Medallion in this case) is able to thrive/survive during the 1998 Russian financial crisis (which felled LTCM), the 2000-2004 tech bubble bursting, the 2007 quant quake, the 2008 financial crisis, and 2010 flash crash, it would seem to suggest that their statistical arbitrage strategy performs well in all manner of environments.
After their very hefty 5/40 fees, their worst year between 2001 and 2013 was a 21% gain [1].
I understand that there are all manner of epistemic and mathematical problems that prevent us ever from completely disentangling luck and skill, but a conceptual framework like "The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville" would seem to apply here. I.e., after a long period of consistent overperformance, the case for skill starts to look much more likely.
There's no need for the aggressive tone.
> Sharpe isn’t changed by leveraging.
Indeed, volatility is, however.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-ta...