[ilzmastr]

I highly doubt it. Most of their hires were more machine learning with speech types from IBM, rather than topologists. I doubt the topologists they did hire were being hired for their expertise in fiber bundles rather than for their general intelligence and intellectual curiosity.

I think other commenters are correct when they say HMMs and linear regression made them much of their money in the 90's. I wrote an article [0] summarizing this.

But it is always tempting to think they must be doing something esoteric and mystical at Medallion. A part of me thinks that when interviewed the employees of Medallion say they do whatever simple XYZ technique from quantopian.com/lectures just so that the reporter with a distant memory of HS math leaves them alone. Another part of me does believe that you can do simple things at scale and still make money.

[0]: https://medium.com/@ilyakavalerov/the-man-who-solved-the-mar...