Renaissance Technologies has completely automated the process of signal discovery.[1] They don't hire researchers to manually derive novel insights or trading models from data, and they don't really bother with exclusive sources of data. Instead, they hire researchers to improve methods for automatically processing vast amounts of arbitrary data and extracting profitable trading signals from it.

When most funds say they're "quantitative", what they really mean is that they use huge amounts of data to inform fundamentally manual trading strategies (this includes most of the places widely considered to be "top" firms). They develop trading algorithms, and those trading algorithms are often successful. But the algorithms are developed manually and then deployed. Their researchers and engineers actively seek out new sources of data and try to compete on novel sources of untapped information. But the reality of what happens is that they simply drown in the data. They can't clean it or process it nearly fast enough to maintain long term trading strategies, nor can they even begin to find a way to automate the trading strategy extraction. If you're working with hundreds of terabytes of data, you cannot selectively formulate hypotheses and test them. It's far too slow. You will find dramatically fewer novel insights than a fully automated process.

In other words, they're a step above traditional "fundamental" hedge funds, but they focus on the wrong problem (but not for lack of trying!). In contrast, the truly successful quant funds have automated the data processing and feature extraction pipeline end to end. The data is a pure abstraction to them. They don't bother with forming hypotheses and trying to find data to test them, they allow their algorithms to actively discover new correlations from the ground up. So many quantitative funds advertise how much data they work with, and how they have all these exotic sources of data at their disposal...but the data does not matter. The models for the data do not matter. The mathematics of efficiently processing that data are what matters.

As a result of their consistent profitability, most of the jobs you see listed for the really successful funds (if they have a website) are not "real" in the strictest sense of the word. You can apply to them, but they only keep active careers pages to attract the best researchers. Their only incentive to hire is to 1) keep someone who is actually exceptional from joining a competitor or 2) keep an academic researcher from re-discovering their work when they seems like they're getting close to it. This is why they primarily focus on quantitative PhDs in information theory, high energy physics and computational mathematics (especially information geometry).

To be completely frank, Renaissance is an outlier, but not just because of their returns. They're an outlier because of how public they are. Most of the funds with comparable returns not only don't take any outside investor capital, they only have 25 - 50 employees. They virtually never hire because they don't have to. If your work is fundamentally interesting, novel and applicable to what they're doing (even if you can't immediately see why), they will call you.

___________________________

1. Other more secretive (but equally successful) funds have done this, but they are much more under the radar.