Quant trader here... I'm a big seller of this list. Making money tends to be a relatively empirical endeavor. It's all about having information about the future and using that in judiciously way and less so about any particular theory or model. I see someone else mentioning Grinold and Khan "Active Portfolio Management", I can't recommend it enough, it's basically a how to for making money quantitatively in a principled way, there are lots of "tips and tricks" that go on top of this and it really helps to have some good intuition for the space you are trying to operate in (by that I mean understanding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of your risk matrix). T-costs are also extremely important and the main "enemy" it's trivial to make money if you don't have to pay to trade.
Steven Boyd at Stanford and his students / colleagues are probably the richest seam of up to date portfolio optimization wisdom. If you are using python you shoult probably be using CVXPY to build your portfolio. He has lots of good papers, e.g. see [2].
Of course you also need an "edge", that information about the future, and that's the jealously guarded part...
The opinions on consultants in the thread is largely negative and it's suggested hiring them is a sign of organisational dysfunction. If you can find information on consulting spend in annual reports you could create a "consultant factor" for stocks and see if big spenders underperform.