If they haven't tested this in actual trades and measured results, it's probably worthless. Even backtested strategies at actual firms observe decays (or don't work) when they get put live. And those are places where they invest in (and are incentivized to get right!) backtesting methodology.
Yes. To add to that, leakage of information is very hard to eliminate during back-testing. Even a fractional bit of information is already too much. In academic papers this is usually ignored.
If they haven't tested this in actual trades and measured results, it's probably worthless. Even backtested strategies at actual firms observe decays (or don't work) when they get put live. And those are places where they invest in (and are incentivized to get right!) backtesting methodology.