Thanks for this interesting review, Bill. In my view, Renaissance Technologies and its rightful competitors do make the investment world a better place.

Above all, Jim Simons is an admired and shining role model. It has encouraged many skilled quants to stand up against never-ending bashing as charlatans by efficient market dogmatists. As known, for them tried and true systematic trend following is still "an ancient tale with no empirical support."

Thus encouraged by Jim, many talented quants developed a truly alternative, i.e. non-correlated source of return by exploiting macro trend inefficiencies in futures markets. In this cost-effective way, they achieved adequately reliable returns and risks at a similar level as equity funds after costs for their clients. Besides E.D. Shaw there are diverse well-managed and -performing quant HFs or CTAs, e.g., Abraham Trading Company, AQR, Dunn, Man AHL, Winton…

This encouraging development also contributed to the breakthrough of Robert Shiller's Behavioral Finance and Andrew Lo's unifying Adaptive Market Hypothesis. Andrew demonstrates it's benefits also practically through the AlphaSimplex Group, he founded. Of course, it primarily offers a systematic trend-following Managed Futures fund with several billions USD of AUM at fair conditions.

Thus, these quants increasingly democratize this tremendously beneficial systematic investment approach now, see for example www.toptradersunplugged.com/about/ by Niels Kaastrup-Larsen for more on that. The acknowledged scientific basis is that "price and volume movements do, in fact, affect future prices", as you mentioned. This is due to and sustained by the losses, flowing without end from the large majority of less illuminated hedge fund managers and masses of other market gamblers.

In my view it is quite fortunate that the losses of these folks can now be systematically exploited and redistributed to more rational people with certainly better uses for the gained money through increasingly common regulated MF or CTA funds. They have been some of the most effective alternatives for diversifying the high risks of equity investments, particularly in stormy times like now, by a simple buy&hold approach without the opportunity costs of low-yielding investments.

Better focus on those CTAs, less outstanding than RT, but nevertheless expected to generate
adequately risk-adjusted, non-correlated returns at fair market conditions. However, they are much less expected to privatize or close too soon.

In addition to providing needed liquidity - at least most of the time - these funds also do contribute substantially to market efficiency and thus to more efficient allocation of capital to productive enterprises as long as they outperform. This is because they eliminate more and more (macro-)inefficiencies in the markets by systematically exploiting them. Or why not?