What do George Soros, Warren Buffett and a computer have in common? Turns out, a lot.

At least that's the view of AQR Capital Management, the program-driven investment firm whose founders made their names finding the math behind investment success. A new paper, which isn't publicly available, posits that a lot of the gains reaped by the legendary managers over time were, in theory, available to anyone using a handful of buy-and-sell signals known to quantitative analysts.