[avvt4avaw]

Quantitative trading is certainly an information game, but that does not mean that the information being used is insider information (which has a specific definition - privileged access to material, nonpublic information).

There is a large amount of public information about a company, and the source of edge in quantitative trading is

  - Identifying what kind of information is likely to move prices
  - Acquiring and processing the information as quickly and efficiently as possible
  - Making good forecasts
  - Combining the forecasts with a model for risk, financing and trading costs to form a portfolio with a high likelihood of positive returns

These are not trivial tasks. The third and fourth bullets are where traditional quant finance (what you read about in textbooks) has focused, and the difficulty of forecasting and portfolio construction should not be underestimated, but increasingly what differentiates a good from a merely average quant investment process is a relentless focus on uncovering and processing new information.

In the past it was enough to use highly structured, numerical data (market prices and volumes, accounting data, analyst forecasts) but the profit available from these sources has been diminishing, and the most important sources of information for forecasting stock prices are unstructured and non-numerical (e.g. text, speech, images).

Renaissance is a leader in its field, and has been for decades. It is perfectly possible for them to have produced the returns that they have, without using insider information.