How Moneyball Investing Ran Into a Data Squeeze Play
Quants can arbitrage away the advantages in factors and statistics almost as soon as they’re discovered. Look at the once-innovative Oakland A’s.
“Moneyball” lineup: Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane and actors Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in 2011.
Photographer: MediaNews Group/Getty
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Baseball is back. Opening day is one of the most blessed days in the American calendar, as winter ends and baseball starts its 162-game season that will be the backdrop for the summer. It’s a time of renewal, and also of timelessness. Baseball has been played in recognizably the form it’s played now, with two teams of nine confronting each other on a diamond, for more than a century. There’s something deeply reassuring about its familiarity and the way it carries on, serene and unchanged, amid a disorderly and changing world.