> You have to own or rent a server with access to direct lines to the exchanges, or else your lag will be such that profiting from HFT is impossible.
A profitable predictor is a much, much harder problem.
At a place like Goldman Sachs, a quant with a working predictor gets paid 5 times as much as the IT guy who makes that predictor talk to the market quickly enough.
Because, as your question implies, it is (relatively) easy to do the IT work or hire someone to do it. Not so for the predictors.
At a place like Goldman Sachs, you don't need quants or predictors. You call up the CEO of a company you want to post record profits, and you tell them if they don't do absolutely desperate, self-destructive things (screwing employees and customers for immediate gains), you will crash their stock and destroy their entire company. That CEO then has a choice. Be the one who killed the company, or be the one who kept it running for a few more weeks and delivered a record quarter that made Goldman Sachs happy.
Once you have the assets and capacity to actively manipulate the price of any stock at will, the market is a VERY different animal and no longer need to be understood at all. You simply force its hand.
A profitable predictor is a much, much harder problem.
At a place like Goldman Sachs, a quant with a working predictor gets paid 5 times as much as the IT guy who makes that predictor talk to the market quickly enough.
Because, as your question implies, it is (relatively) easy to do the IT work or hire someone to do it. Not so for the predictors.