[multicast]

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.