[PhantomGremlin]

it is a $500+ trillion dollar industry, and a lot of money is being lost in pricing errors

If I had a magical algorithm that was so much better than what was out there, I'd keep it to myself for about a year or two. If I could capture about 0.2% of the value of that industry, I'd increase my net worth to about 1 trillion dollars. Surely it couldn't be that hard to squeeze 0.2% of inefficiency out of options?

IOW, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

I never could understand why people want to share these sorts of breakthroughs with the world, rather than use them to become wealthy beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

[zzleeper]

They are not sharing it: "Oquant approximation (prop mathematical algorithm)"

They just derive more value from selling this to everyone than from investing in-house. Partly because if you want to get some alpha in hft or whatnot you probably need a lot of other things (networks, lots of capital, etc.)