macrocephalopod

This is a good question! Some possible answers - 1. Infrastructure that is too expensive or too hard to build yourself (eg colocation, low latency data feeds, compute clusters, fpgas) 2. Data that is too expensive or simply impossible to buy (eg historical tick data)https://twitter.com/mobile_mm/status/1373427747901542402 …

That said, it's absolutely the right question for an investor to ask. "Why is this person offering *me* a piece of their money tree?" Most of the time, the answer is "They don't actually have one."

It’s a fine question and one that needs to be asked. But an anodyne answer is that many (possibly most) good quant strategies are probably more valuable as part of a multi-strat fund and/or part of an institutional portfolio.

This is a great point. And I think the answer to the question I posed, in that case, would be "because this is a good home for your strat". It's the Millennium model, basically.

Agree. And to be a little more explicit than (what I think) MCPD was getting at: assuming a finite shelf life for a strat, working within an institution gives the budget, infrastructure and (usually) a network/sounding board for building new strats.