One small quibble - wind turbines produce electricity, wind mills mill grain. I know it's pedantic, but people in the industry get really irked when the machines are referred to as windmills. I don't know why exactly, maybe due to the marketing difficulties of "mills" versus "turbines" or because engineers like precise terminology.

I guess the avout of Arbre would refer to the distinction as"bulshytt" though, so take from it what you will.

edit: Ah, I see this was discussed below under another parent. Apologies if anyone takes umbrage to the distinction discussion.

Windmills mill down gears/bearings into metal/ceramic powder. They produce toxic electricity as waste which is transported elsewhere for disposal.

You're just being pedantic at that point. Wind turbine / mill is used interchangeably in the populace, and they are the ones you need to convince that these projects are viable.

Is the implication of

the answer is 'we have loads of PhD math geniuses building the strategies and amazing execution technology'

that the institutional DD team is saying this to the investment committee or there is actually another entirely different reason?

Yes, the DD team needs to say something that sounds like they've done their work properly.

So they'll come in with a list of checkboxes, which as a fund manager you learn to tick. Even if the questions have no bearing on how you're actually making money. So you might get asked what qualifications people have (very few people actually have a qualification in building strategies), or you'll get asked something quite superficial about what technology you're using (what's it written in? C or C#? Those are the same, right? That's good...)

Unfortunately, most of the DD teams I've seen do not ask the questions they need to ask. They have a long list of irrelevant questions that make sense to people who are in the CYA (cover your ass) business, not investing or coding. I never met anyone who asked me whether we used version control, and only a small sample bothered to ask whether we had our own money in the fund (one smart guy avoided a 50% blowup by doing this and discovering the big boss had barely any skin in the fund).

Got it! Thanks for the response. I wasn't sure whether that was a comment on RT's strategy (i.e. implying something else going on) or on the industry as a whole.

It'd be an interesting short white paper/post to see what a technical take on DD would be in a fund of funds/institutional investing scenario. I guess that would take away some of the value of the rise in the "consultants" we're getting calls from every day.

Pick up a copy of "How to Read Literature Like A Professor" by Thomas C. Foster at your library. My AP Lit instructor had me read it almost a decade ago (after similar complaints) and it helped me enjoy required undergrad literature classes much more - gives a practical, fair insight into literary analysis.