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I imagine that if one has enough capital to fully arbitrage an opportunity, it is possible to

A) capture the entire available upside

B) estimate how large that opportunity might be, and not attempt to over-stoke it.

C) by capturing the entire opportunity, prevent the signal from being visible to the broader market. The only sign that a need is being met could be trade-volume rather than price movement.

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That's why most quant hedge funds only have limited amount of aum. Most their strategies consist of a large amount of low volume trades. Low volume to prevent the ghost pattern being visible to others. This is especially true for non hft firms that hold positions in a much longer interval (minutes - hours - days). But this is untrue of course for lets say a big macro hedge fund that throws a hundred million dollars into a currency trade.

I totally agree on all three points and I even think that a certain amount of capital, opportunity related (not fees etc.), is not even needed to mine a pattern. Because according to the ones statistics and research the actually existing pattern should appear anyway.

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