I'd really be interested to know about the foul play angle, but firms like these buy drone and satellite data, surely they have some information advantage?
Well, the thing is that other extremely good firms buy drone and satellite data, and other firms also pay the top rate to extremely good people, and etc.
So either RenTech is somehow consistently wildly smarter than the rest of the industry through some completely unknown secret, or something else is up. They might be using insider information, they might have a deal with someone news firms* to get news early, they might use illegal order execution techniques. There's a whole slew of things they might be doing to get an advantage. Maybe they use funds other than Medallion (the super good one) as a testbed for strategies and deploy the really good ones to their best fund. FWIW, I don't think funds started by anybody who left there are as successful so the secrets aren't leaving.
* A friend of mine in the hft industry told an interesting story to me. A high-speed news wire was very predictive of when orders relevant to the news would get run over - except backwards in time. The news was consistently a few minutes late. So either the high-speed news wire was laughably worse than the competition or somebody was getting news early through illicit means.
