It existed prior to GME as well, which really should tell you that anyone who is using this is going against people who have spent the last decade at least perfecting signals based on this exact same data.

The hope isn’t that you find some unique signal to trade on. The hope is you find some signal that does not scale in a meaningful way, so it is less likely professional firms are going to devote resources to trading it.

If you stumble into a fresh, scalable signal it’s unlikely it will continue to be profitable after six months. Once you scale to any real profitable size the market will notice and either change behavior, or trade the same signal at a faster speed.

While true (I 100% agree with you in the distinction), the statement is “Your agent acts before the market does”, which is simply not going to be the case (assuming this is helping run some sort of trend following strategy). Professional traders who are sensitive to alternative public data sources are already taking that data in quickly and their execution is colocated with the venues. You’re still going to be significantly behind the curve (to a financially dangerous extent in my opinion).

there are tons of other trading activities than HFT, in which you can easily deploy agents as it is not everywhere about milliseconds and exchange-CoLo

HFT != Algorithmic trading