The market cannot be beat by 99.9% of professional investors spending all their time day and night trying and with a team of people helping them.
I'm calling your bluff on you being an econ PhD student or maybe you have been one for a month or two at most...? If you are an econ grad student you know what RenTec is doing more or less. At least in theory if not specifics, people talk and there's plenty of econ papers explaining what's underneath major quant strategies.
People need to chill bringing up RenTec when finance comes up (Buffett too). Just like they need to chill bringing up Facebook when talking about startup valuations. Outliers are outliers.