&gt; literally everybody trades with computers<p>Quant funds don&#x27;t trade <i>with</i> computers - in fact, computers trade <i>instead of</i> humans.<p>&gt; the number of trades you make doesn&#x27;t determine alpha<p>No, but it does determine how statistically significant your alpha is. If I make 1 good trade, it might be alpha or it might be a lucky guess. If I make 10000 good trades, it&#x27;s unlikely to be just a lucky guess.<p>&gt; certainly no sense to &#x27;alpha becoming beta.&#x27;<p>Trend following used to be &quot;alpha&quot;, but now it&#x27;s considered &quot;beta&quot; - in the sense that everybody can replicate it, and there is no specific &quot;alpha&quot;-based fee warranted for a fund executing trend-following strategies.<p>&gt; there is no a priori reason that their strategies must or will become public<p>the more people know about it, the easier the math behind it, and the more broadly it applies, the more chance there is that it becomes &quot;public&quot; knowledge (public in the sense that many industry practitioners working for different funds know about it)<p>&gt; but compare that to seriously unscalable fields such as venture capital<p>Well, given that quite a few venture funds are bigger than $10bn [1], I wouldn&#x27;t call that &quot;seriously unscalable&quot;. But in any case, my comparision was to trend following (Winton has about $30bn), global macro (Bridgewater&#x27;s Pure Alpha has about $50bn), and passive index investing (SPDR S&amp;P 500 ETF is &gt; $100bn).<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;alexkonrad&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;midas-top-ten-list-2015&#x2F;#58e39be11285" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;alexkonrad&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;midas-top-...</a>