[sflicht]

> he doesn’t need to do anything anymore to keep the AÍ [money?] printing machine going

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how systematic trading strategies differ from some other ML problems. It's an adversarial, nonstationary environment. The same strategies don't just keep working indefinitely. (Not to mention the fact that maintaining any complex production software system requires an enormous amount of work, even completely ignoring the need to keep developing new alpha. For instance, consider the case when certain oil prices went briefly negative in 2020 -- even if your software was so perfect that it was unaffected by that event [hah!] remember that many of the counterparties you actually trade with may not have been as clever. This is just one small example. as markets evolve, they will find ways to turn up new bugs in your code.)

[kranke155]

I am aware of it being an adversarial environment, but right now they are on top and they can afford the “maintenance” fees on keeping the machine going, probably with a lot of the top AÍ talent that’s available to recruit (considering their earnings). Mercer himself can just live off the earnings.