No, it’s not worth it for them to spend $50k in someone’s salary getting them up to speed on the local culture of a place to discover a trade that might be worth 150k.

But totally worth it to create a “local” team that will find 10,000 such trades by using advanced aggregation and analysis techniques.

If it’s not worth it tot hem it’s not worth it to us either then. The rules of ROI are the same for billionaire or for me.

You’re not getting the math. It’s absolutely worth it for you to spend 2 months of your time to find something worth $150k.

A hedge fund, investing team, whatever you want to call it, has a limited capacity. They need to beat market returns on pool of money so large that spending 2 months to find a 300% return on something with a max investment of $75k is absolutely an incorrect use of time.

Read about opportunity cost to understand why there are many things “worth it” to people without access to something better.

A hedge fund needs to post good returns on the capital it has with the man power it has. They simply do not have enough resources to spend time on netting 100% returns on 50k investments. And they can't hire the problem away either, unless they pay each new employee less than 50k.