It sounds so profoundly anti-capitalist - if the knowledge of certain strategy is so important, the employee should be retained by paying them more and giving them better perks instead of enforced labor contract.
This is not true in trading. If I go take my strategy/forecast and go to a competitor, I can just outright take the same opportunities that the other desk was taking (to a fairly good approximation). There's no real branding/network effect - it's a pure quality of execution business.
But I think it is slightly silly reading your statements knowing that the individuals in that hyper specific industry are top earners already and educated to know what they are signing up for.
Furthermore the industry attracts the sort of people who are never satisfied with what they got, and are always looking for more.
Not that I'm advocating for non-competes, just saying that you can't address the concerns non-competes are attempting to address by "paying employees well".
There's definitely an argument here that those companies deserve to be out-competed then.
I'm not saying to ban any of these practices, but the legal system doesn't have to guarantee the feasibility of companies.
Only if you have an extremely vague and poorly defined definition of "capitalist", which I don't blame you, most people are ignorant, and we live in a society that prefers to throw out opinions like they're reality.
Otherwise, the biggest firms (e.g. Millenium, Citadel) could simply "buy out" any already-successful researcher, offering them more money (either in terms of % of profit, or - more importantly as it scales with size (for many strategies) - offering more capital to trade with.
This particular suggestion breaks down fast when you have multiple employees that need to collaborate. If you have a million dollar strategy, you can pay half a million to an employee as a retention bonus. But you can't pay half a million each to 8 employees.