In this day and age of AI, I think it's worth trying to build a better economy simulator without having any existing economic models in mind. Addressing this from a programming point of view could lead to interesting results.
With no reports of funds consistently beating the market in a surprising way.
There’s no consistent way to make money. You can exploit small details about how each market works, but in a short time everyone will notice and copy you. It’s like a market without patents. People talk, the trade ideas spread. Like wildfire. Too fast even for a quant to make sense - good managers can tell if a piece of info is hot. No manager will ever be able to tell whether a stock will outperform.
It's a common misconception about hedge funds that objective is to outperform market.
The objective is to maximize profit per unit of risk taken.
If hedge fund made 20% less than market but took 50% less risk, that's a MASSIVE value proposition.
(now, one could argue they fail at that too, but that's more difficult to prove)
