It's probably pretty easy to keep the returns on a pot as small as $10bn sweet if you just reserve all your best alphas for that fund. There are proprietary trading firms trading pots that size for a single shareholder.

What I've been told is that Rentech also effectively use their public funds as a source of revenue to juice development of proprietary platform, so some of it is business cunning rather than a hard technical edge.

They were also got on the quant train very early.