I was reading the latest earnings call transcript of this HFT firm Virtu Financial the other day, and it does appear to be that way.
>So there is a back and forth here and all of the other players that we compete with, they are also economic animals. They don't have any magic elixir or magic algorithm that we don't have, right. We all kind of are doing the same thing and we're all providing great service and value for the marketplace. So I know this a little handy way to give an answer but there is an ebbs and flows around competition. The business continues to be very profitable for us on a net basis. On a gross basis it's incredibly profitable but as I said in my remarks, we have paid, put that in quotes, not in our financials we've provided back to our retail customers about $950 million of price improvement this year.
Also Virtu is a dying market participant. They were flying high but then lost out. Probably why they're talking about providing price improvements instead of raking in cash.
>So there is a back and forth here and all of the other players that we compete with, they are also economic animals. They don't have any magic elixir or magic algorithm that we don't have, right. We all kind of are doing the same thing and we're all providing great service and value for the marketplace. So I know this a little handy way to give an answer but there is an ebbs and flows around competition. The business continues to be very profitable for us on a net basis. On a gross basis it's incredibly profitable but as I said in my remarks, we have paid, put that in quotes, not in our financials we've provided back to our retail customers about $950 million of price improvement this year.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4386120-virtu-financial-inc...
Top quantitative firms like RenTec don't rely critically on speed or compute power, but rather on high quality data, which they've also said publicly.