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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

The article is pretty useless frankly.

The mystery about how Rentec makes a ton of money is very real - nobody seem to have a clue. It's most probably indeed due to some excellent math / engineering work, but could very well be a fraud too - wouldn't be a first time that something is 'very secretive' for a reason.

Btw, another interesting trading company is XTX - founded by a Russian-born mathematician Alexander Gerko - they are huge (in terms of trading volumes and profits, not in terms of headcount), and apparently using a lot of modern machine learning.

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I really doubt RenTec is a scam. I talked to someone who is friends with a partner there, it seems unlikely it's a scam. What's more likely is that they have an entrenched market position: agreements with counterparties that only they can get, knowledge about tech that is only useful with the rest of the setup, and generally good management.

The thing about this space is everyone thinks it's magical, that you somehow by being smart can build a money machine. My view is it's like any other business, there's a mix of factors that contribute.

XTX is eating a lot of the FX space both by being smart about tech and by focusing on certain things within the ecosystem, for instance not just about being fast but having good distribution as well.

I don't doubt that you may be true, but HN was full of comments explaining how FTX/Alameda is not a scam, but how they use deep knowledge, domain information, how they are ruthless and efficient, how they are scientific and disciplined, how they are "real sharks", etc.

EDIT: here is a relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503820

Yeah but RT has been going great for a lifetime, publicly to start with, then privately. You wouldn't take a thing off the market if it was a scam.

FTX was legit making money, they just also blew even more of it. Somehow.

Alameda was legit making money; their strategy was to be long everything with leverage - all the time. Mathematical geniuses in a raising market, lost 100bn in a declining market.

> You wouldn't take a thing off the market if it was a scam.

Turning crime profits into legitimate businesses is classic mafia behavior.

I seriously doubt it's a scam as the flagship medallion fund is only available for insiders (people who actually work at rentec and know how it works).

If you read the book “The Man Who Solved the Markets” it also explains it took them 30 years to get the magic money machine.

Frauds don’t fake 30 years of work generally to build

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