Prosecutors Request Closed Courtroom For Goldman HFT Programmer's Trial 250
dave562 writes "Goldman Sachs' lawyers have asked the Federal judge to seal the court room during the trial of Sergey Aleynikov. Aleynikov was one of the programmers who developed Goldman's High Frequency Trading (HFT) programs. What does this say about the state of the financial industry? Given the problems HFT seems to have caused over the last few years, shouldn't more light be shined into the dark corners of how it works?"
There is a good chance code will be revealed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is a good chance code will be revealed (Score:5, Interesting)
If it is a program, there are assumptions. If those assumptions are false, then the program is exploitable. If the program is exploitable, it will be exploited. If it is exploited, people will lose their shirts while others make a fortune. The rich don't want to be fleeced automatically by computers, they just want to fleece others with computers.
That is all this is.
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There are two golden rules ...
Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
The person with the gold rules.
Also, you ignore that our court system NEEDS to be open except for very specific reasons. Keeping "source code" secret isn't one of them. Especially if the source code is part of the prosecution for whatever "crime" was committed.
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IT will be open eventually, just not until someone is convicted. The court process is not about indirectly punishing someone for being charged, it's about determining innocence or guilt and only then punishing someone if it's appropriate. If there is a conviction, it will all be public. If not, then disclosing the source code and methods does little but harm the programmer.
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Also, you ignore that our court system NEEDS to be open except for very specific reasons. Keeping "source code" secret isn't one of them. Especially if the source code is part of the prosecution for whatever "crime" was committed.
Preserving trade secrets is one of those "very specific reasons".
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The shill speaks. So much for transparency.
Well excuse me, but this shill has a little more to say here. You and the rest of the public don't have a right to know private trade secrets. You can bluster all you want about "transparency", but it's just a pathetic excuse to unjustly cause up to billions of dollars of harm to an unpopular business.
We don't need to see the extremely valuable computer code (and possibly other trade secrets) to have transparency in this court case, hence, we don't get to see it.
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I don't understand why trade secrets shoud be protected. Wasn't pate
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Trade secrets only stay secret if you keep them that way. This is no different than if Coke asked for closed doors when it was going to present its secret formula.
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This is no different than if Coke asked for closed doors when it was going to present its secret formula.
True, BUT the courts would be likely to grant Coke's request precisely to help protect their formula from public disclosure.
Re:There is a good chance code will be revealed (Score:5, Insightful)
If coke were accusing an employee of something relating to millions of dollars where they needed to present part of the formula as evidence and the court denied their request for closed doors, they might be forced to not present the evidence or not pursue trial at all. The formula is worth far more than one trial so they would probably walk away from having to publicly display it--if the employee was actually guilty of something, he would run free since coke would be unable to present key evidence.
Re:There is a good chance code will be revealed (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why trade secrets shoud be protected.
Because it can cause billions of dollars worth of harm to Goldman. It's reasonable to make this request.
Wasn't patent law allowed under the Constitution to prevent just this sort of thing?
No. Patent law was designed to encourage companies to reveal their relevant trade secrets in exchange for a temporary monopoly.
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Before anyone jumps in to argue that patents protect what would be otherwise trade secrets, so there need be no protection for trade secrets, the point is this: you can't force someone to reveal their secrets, so you induce them but guaranteeing them if they reveal the secret, they'll have the full might of the government helping them out.
If your unpatented trade secret is revealed, you have recourse against the person who leaked it (often an employee with shallow pockets filled with dust, not greenbacks),
Trade Secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I approve of HFT in any way shape or form. But this guy is going to be talking about the system that allows the to have an edge over their competitors. If I were in that company's position, I'd very much like that testimony to remain sealed as well.
-Rick
Re:Trade Secrets? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, if I were manipulating markets I wouldn't want that to get out either.
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yeah but the fishy thing here is that it is not the Goldsack lawyer that requested the secretly but the federal prosecutor...
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Which Goldman Sachs lawyer? Since Aleynikov is being prosecuted criminally, not sued, it's the federal prosecutor in court claiming wrong-doing; Goldman Sachs' lawyers aren't representing either side.
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I am pretty sure Goldman have some lawyers there as they are an interested party.
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yeah but the fishy thing here is that it is not the Goldsack lawyer that requested the secretly but the federal prosecutor...
It's common sense. By making the request, you avoid having the opposition use it as a means to delay progress of the trial. Expediting the trial is a good, short term prosecutor move.
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OK, I did not thought about this that way, thanks you for the insight
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This software didn't allow Goldman Sachs to have a competitive edge over their competitors, it contributed to a massive financial collapse that resulted in taxpayers being robbed trillions of dollars. If this were a murder trial, should we make the trial secret because the gun manufacture doesn't want his competitors to know what kinds of springs he used?
This isn't about protecting intellectual property, it's about reminding we mere peasants that don't have as much influence over our government as our lords
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If I were in that company's position, I'd very much like that testimony to remain sealed as well.
And it's the courts' job to keep rich people happy.
Re:Trade Secrets? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it were just the HFT source to be protected, then the judge can seal a few documents or clear the court for a few witnesses. That's not a good enough reason to close the entire trial.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
What does this say about the state of the financial industry? Given the problems HFT seems to have caused over the last few years, shouldn't more light be shined into the dark corners of how it works?
No... then they’d actually have to fix it...
Here is a Google analogy...(sorry no cars) (Score:2)
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in that way - the actual proceedings do not need to be closed only the content of a few documents.
Can't quite put my finger on it.... (Score:3, Interesting)
but something seems unexpected about this level of concern by the Justice Department.
Obviously they know that "pay no attention to the computer behind the curtain" isn''t going to cut it. One suspects that the government is less interested in protecting Goldman's trade secrets than in making sure the public doesn't find out just how badly computerized trading has made it impossible for normal people to compete in todays stock market.
Or maybe the massive drop off in political contributions from Wall Street following all the tar and feathering they have been getting from the current administration (far beyond the taring and feathering that they DO deserve) has gotten some peoples attention and they really are concerned with their ability to fund raise, I mean the ability of companies not to be unjustifiably victimized just because they happen to be *gasp* profitable.
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but something seems unexpected about this level of concern by the Justice Department.
I don't know why you'd think that. The DoJ has an interest in removing obstacles to progress of the trial. The defense could use this issue to delay the trial significantly.
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Your also forgetting that they have an interest in prosecuting without issues that could cause a verdict to be over turned.
With all the political fevoring out there and general distaste for wall-street right now, releasing this information or making this public could raise a number of legal and ethics challenges causing something to be overturned or vacated on appeal.
Suppose releasing this information caused a public outcry which tainted the jury or worse yet, caused protests on the court house steps that i
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600,000,000,000,000? [newsweek.com]
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Well, that's not true either.
The biggest problem with the "current clusterfuck" was not so much bad loans per se. Bad loans are and were not unexpected with the sort of lower-quality loans that were being made, even though the extent of the defaults has been unexpectedly high. A major problem that allowed this to spread from the sub-sector of the financial industry that deals with housing to the wider market was the financial engineering that was supposed to generate safe AAA assets out of a pool of crap, a
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Oh - and your blame for Fannie and Freddie fails to explain how there can also have been a housing bubble in the UK, where FNMC and FNMA don't operate and there is no UK equivalent.
Your logic is flawed, I did not say that "the ONLY thing that can cause a housing bubble is..X", I said that "the primary cause of THIS the bubble and financial crisis was X", that somewhere else there can also be a bubble and crisis for different reasons has no bearing on the validity of my statement.
Goldman's Lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
Normally, I'd nitpick about how the Federal Prosecutors asked for this and not Goldman's lawyers. However, with the political and economic landscape being what they are, federal prosecutors have really become Goldman's lawyers.
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They don't call it Government Sachs for nothing. Take a look at who is at GS that used to be in the Federal Govt, and visa versa. This just stinks. And that which smells like shit usually is the Bull Shit they're trying to pass off to the public.
Unfair advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a monopoly on the stock market, WAY too much power in the hands of one company.
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They aren’t legal, but they do indicate that the system is broken. It’s susceptible to what amounts to a denial of service attack.
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Disregard that. High-frequency trading is legal. I must be thinking of something else.
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I’m quite familiar with the saying, but I didn’t know where it came from. Linky please?
Re:Unfair advantage (Score:5, Funny)
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I want this for my .sig now.
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It is not a monopoly on the stock market because every medium to large trading house has its own HFT system. It does put individuals and smaller trading houses at a disadvantage but HFT generally takes advantage of small changes in price by volume. We wouldn't make much if we bought 100 shares of a stock that dipped by $.01 for one second, but Goldmans and the like can make a return on
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Re:Unfair advantage (Score:4, Informative)
The only reason these systems work is because they have special access to the data. They can see trade data a couple hundred milliseconds before anyone else and can place their trades a couple hundred milliseconds faster than anyone else. If you can't see the tactical advantage of effectively seeing the near future and be able to react faster than would-be competitors... well then I guess I really don't know what is left to say.
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There is no "special" data. You can get it too.
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It's basically just a fancy form of insider trading which the SEC hasn't felt like cracking down on yet. Back in the 20s they had a similar scam going. The price for tomorrows stocks would be provided to select brokers the day before. It's just now that the time interval is smaller than what it used to be
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The special part of the data is that you have it a some milliseconds before anyone else does, by dint of having your servers physically right next to the exchange.
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Yep... anybody can just saunter into NYSE, plug their laptop into the same colocation racks [advancedtrading.com] as G. Sachs, et. al, and immediately being making money the ULLDMA [wikipedia.org] way.
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This "special" access is available to anyone willing to pay for it. If you choose not to pay the higher price for faster market data, then I don't think you can blame the other guy for being faster. For what its worth, the really cutting edge market data solutions are all third party and available to anyone who will write a check. The costs of these things quickly skyrocketed past the point where it made sense for each firm to build their own system.
Re:Unfair advantage (Score:4, Informative)
We're not talking about paying a few extra bucks on your ETrade account to remove the 15 minute embargo.
Goldman arranged for their servers to be co-located with the stock exchange's servers. Which means they get data faster and can place trades faster than anyone who is not located in the exchange's data center. That kind of access is not available to anyone but the largest investment banks.
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That is a completely false statement. Small firms are a lot more likely to use colos than the big banks. As I posted before, there is information on how to get colocated with NYSE right on their website:
http://www.nyse.com/technologies/sfti/1228187874506.html [nyse.com]
The costs run about $10k/month/rack if I remember right.
There is no spooky back-room stuff going on here.
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How is this type of computer system that trades before anyone else even CAN considered fair or even legal?
Well, the HFT system itself is obviously legal. But why would I care if it is "fair"? You could always spend a few tens of millions of dollars to get your own HFT system and code monkeys.
This is a monopoly on the stock market, WAY too much power in the hands of one company.
Is it? The whole point of the trial was that a programmer is accused of stealing the code for a competitor. Presence of a competitor implies absence of a monopoly.
Re:Unfair advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing that "anyone" can do this. Please point me to where I can sign up to collocate my server with the market computers - because that is actually necessary to set up an effective HFT system.
The ability of an elite few to buy access to information about the value of an item, when that information is unavailable to others with whom they will buy and sell that item, is a violation of free market premises.
Much of what the SEC regulations do is to produce a free market. This is what many political pundits fail to understand - the "free" in free market does not mean "unregulated". The best regulatory approach in the world would never create a 100% ideal free market - money will always be able to buy research - but there's a difference between "not being able to produce a perfectly flat playing field" vs. "allowing people to artificially create an information assymetry, with the express purpose of taking profits from those on the other side of the field, with an insanely high barrier to entry for those who want to join you". HFT is the latter.
HFT is a practice that should be regulated out of existence.
Re:Unfair advantage (Score:5, Informative)
I keep hearing that "anyone" can do this. Please point me to where I can sign up to collocate my server with the market computers - because that is actually necessary to set up an effective HFT system.
http://www.lightspeed.com/?page_id=5068 [lightspeed.com]
http://www.limebrokerage.com/contact_us.shtml [limebrokerage.com]
http://www.ften.com/buy-side-products/vx-velocityxpress.html [ften.com]
They all offer colocation services.
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I keep hearing that "anyone" can do this. Please point me to where I can sign up to collocate my server with the market computers - because that is actually necessary to set up an effective HFT system.
I haven't done this, but contact the major stock exchanges. I imagine all the major ones and a few minor ones offer collocation services.
Much of what the SEC regulations do is to produce a free market. This is what many political pundits fail to understand - the "free" in free market does not mean "unregulated". The best regulatory approach in the world would never create a 100% ideal free market - money will always be able to buy research - but there's a difference between "not being able to produce a perfectly flat playing field" vs. "allowing people to artificially create an information assymetry, with the express purpose of taking profits from those on the other side of the field, with an insanely high barrier to entry for those who want to join you". HFT is the latter.
I don't know. Paying to get an information asymmetry sounds very natural to me. And I doubt the barriers are "insanely high" else the stock market would be losing money.
HFT is a practice that should be regulated out of existence.
You need to come up with a reason first. Whining that someone spent gobs of money to get a nonexclusive trade advantage is not a legitimate reason.
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I keep hearing that "anyone" can do this. Please point me to where I can sign up to collocate my server with the market computers - because that is actually necessary to set up an effective HFT system.
The ability of an elite few to buy access to information about the value of an item, when that information is unavailable to others with whom they will buy and sell that item, is a violation of free market premises.
Much of what the SEC regulations do is to produce a free market. This is what many political pundits fail to understand - the "free" in free market does not mean "unregulated". The best regulatory approach in the world would never create a 100% ideal free market - money will always be able to buy research - but there's a difference between "not being able to produce a perfectly flat playing field" vs. "allowing people to artificially create an information assymetry, with the express purpose of taking profits from those on the other side of the field, with an insanely high barrier to entry for those who want to join you". HFT is the latter.
HFT is a practice that should be regulated out of existence.
This came up before on Slashdot, and the regulation to introduce is simple: Change trading from a "first come, first served" system into something like a "turned based" game. The exchange should disseminate information and accept trades only at widely spaced "ticks", say, once a minute, or even further apart.
Nothing of value is lost, but the ability to gain an unfair advantage through high-speed trading vanishes.
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Volume is lost. Which you might not consider being "of value" but to the exchange it's the very valuable.
That's a good thing -- the exchange can save money by not having to have server infrastructure capable of handling a huge, real-time load. They can perform trades using a much more efficient and cheaper batch processing system.
They can make their 'cut' either way, it's not like they suddenly have to give up their primary source of income.
Anybody that needed to make a legitimate trade can still trade exactly as they would have done otherwise. The number of real trades will not change. The volume of *real* tr
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Is it? The whole point of the trial was that a programmer is accused of stealing the code for a competitor. Presence of a competitor implies absence of a monopoly.
No it doesn't. It implies that somebody wants to compete, it does not imply that they're already in the market.
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Anyone with reasonably deep pockets can build one. Speed advantages in the stock market have always existed. Why do you think the floor brokers are there? They wanted to be able to trade on information first. People are just going all OMG about it because its on computers, and therefore somehow scarier to them (and you even see this on Slashdot, which is strange).
You can't control or direct the market with these systems any more than a guy in the pit that can yell BUY faster than everyone else. You need to
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Nope. You are talking about limit orders. Completely different thing than HFT [wikipedia.org]. In Goldman's case, they're really talking about what Wikipedia calls "ultra-low-latency direct market access (ULLDMA)", which is only available if you are a very large investment bank and can convince the stock exchange to put your server in their data center. That kind of access is not available to everyone.
Re:Unfair advantage (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, HFT is largely a small firm game. Some big banks do it, but not all, and they are usually small operations.
The typical profile of an HFT firm is 20 guys in a smallish but nice office, kind of like a startup's, but a bit more grown up. It's not that hard to get your box in a colo w/ NYSE, you just have to pay them. They recently built a huge new datacenter for this very purpose.
I haven't personally made the call to ask about requirements, but I worked at an 8 man startup firm and we threw around the idea of colocating. Being able to was never an issue, it was the cost that deterred us.
No big surprise (Score:4, Informative)
Easy fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Those firms should only be allowed to act as one part of the system and be restricted from taking advantage of acting as a multi-role entity by the law.
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Not sure how exactly that isn't a problem.
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Yeah, because the stock market crash of 2008 is so two years ago.
Any industry at 35 to 1 (Bear Stearns) or 50 to 1 (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) leverage is going to crash sooner or later. I give an example with pizza makers [slashdot.org]. It had nothing to do with HFT.
Trade secrets are worse than patents (Score:2)
OK, for all you whiners about the evils of software patents, this is what you get - secret algorithms.
US law used to disfavor trade secrets, encouraging patents. Patents have a limited life, and disclose the technology. Trade secrets have a potentially unlimited life, and no disclosure requirement.
Note that in dealing with Microsoft's technology, patents were a minor headache for interoperability, but secret APIs have been a huge obstacle to interoperability.
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OK, for all you whiners about the evils of software patents, this is what you get - secret algorithms.
And this is a problem because?
'Secret algorithms' are far less painful than patents, because anyone can produce their own algorithm, whereas no-one can use tech covered by even the stupidest and most absurdly obvious patent without risking a long and expensive court battle.
Of course no sane legal system would close a sourt just because someone's 'secret algorithm' might be mentioned.
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Of course they would, or they would open themselves up to a possible lawsuit asking for damages in the amount of possible profits (+ penalty, interest, legal fees) lost because of it.
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Of course they would, or they would open themselves up to a possible lawsuit asking for damages in the amount of possible profits (+ penalty, interest, legal fees) lost because of it.
So you're going to sue the government because your 'secret algorithm' was important evidence in a criminal case?
How can anyone determine whether a court case was legitimate if they're not allowed to see the evidence? Closed courts in all but the most extreme cases go completely against the very basis of the anglo legal system.
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Of course no sane legal system would close a sourt just because someone's 'secret algorithm' might be mentioned.
I fail to see what is "insane" about closing the court for the part of the case that involves trade secrets that, if revealed, would have a huge financial impact on a very large company.
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HFT is already pretty exclusionary, so I'm not sure that's the real issue.
Also, barring a screw-up at the PTO, you'd have to actually be ahead of the curve on HFT techniques and would only get a monopoly on those advances - not on anything necessary to doing HFT today.
And given the short expected lifetime of an HFT algorithm (particularly if one is optimistic enough to hope that the practice might become illegal in the near future) I'm not sure you'd want to invest in a patent, whereas protecting a trade se
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There's a big difference between software that one company is using in-house, vs. software that a company is selling for others to use. Preserving trade secret protection on, say, the GIF encoding algorithms would've been pretty much impossible.
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Of course, if they were allowed to patent it, then it would become a 'broadest patent takes all' competition and everyone else would have to risk lawsuits for infringement or beg to license the algorithms...
But the major players in most industries will already have patent licensing deals with each other because they can't operate without access to each others' patents.
Patents exist to keep everyone else out of the market, not to gain more than a minor temporary advantage over your competitors.
Not Unheard Of (Score:5, Informative)
Useless (Score:2, Insightful)
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Because they are not one in the same.
The HFT is supposed to only be an action only to reaction to the market, the news article you linked to is where they manipulated the market for their gain which is illegal even though it primarily exploited a HFT program. Now, this court case is similar only in that it revolves around a HFT program. It's about someone taking the code and transporting it somewhere to use to their benefit/whatever (stealing trade secrets).
You can do whatever you want to gain an edge in th
It's the Wall Street Tax, Baby (Score:2)
Hyperfast trading is a window into the future (a few milliseconds into the future, but a window into the future nonetheless). Imagine you could go back in time and pick stocks . . .. That's what those sons of bitches are doing--completely lawfully thanks to elected officials who believe in "deregulation" . . .
The effect is a tax--a Wall Street tax--on every transaction they involve themselves in. They get to drive the price up before you buy--and take a little slice for themselves.
Yeah, small government
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Humans will find a way to exploit any system. Look at any online RPG out there. They all start with the most level playing field imaginable and strive to ensure equality. And yet eventually you end with haves and have-nots.
What we need is regulation that is flexible and able to respond to a changing environment. We also need regulation that doesn't favor special interests and don't compromise. Perhaps a true free market would eventually work through any problem, but I think it's likely that most problems wo
the stock market needs a "heartbeat" (Score:2)
pick a frequency, any frequency: 100 millseconds, 3 seconds, 1 second... all trades are queued and batched in those intervals, nothing faster. so it is not possible to game the system with more hardware with crazier algorithms and faster connections to wall street
otherwise you simply have domination of the entire stock market by a few wealthy players. small investors will leave, or continually suffer an invisible tax on every one of their trades
its a classic case of the largest players in a marketplace abus
It's not ABOUT High Frequency Trading (Score:5, Insightful)
Others have pointed out that Goldman Sachs record is statistically IMPOSSIBLE. See Seeking Alpha here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/154083-goldman-is-its-trading-performance-statistically-reasonable?source=commenter [seekingalpha.com]
Also, the exchanges have seen rashes of NOP orders placed. Fake trades designed to jam the queues to create artificial windows of opportunity to front-run big market movements. Goldman Sachs is probably (fuck probably, they are certainly) gaming NBBO and pocketing the difference millions of times a day.
For the less market knowledgeable out there (basically, most of Slashdot), they are running the scam Richard Pryor did in Superman, or in Office Space. They are skimming pennies off the market by seeing a trade ahead of it hitting the exchange, then jamming NOP orders in while they calculate and move a trade ahead of that to piggyback on the effect of the larger trade on share price.
Denninger has been all over this story:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2139302 [market-ticker.org]
Sergey's code probably contains stuff in it that jams NOP orders into the system, or shows how it using something simple like the dragon tools or plain ol' tcpdump to inspect orders as they fly-by on the tap. In fact, Sergey's code may PROVE beyond a reasonable doubt that Goldman Sachs is tapping the NYSE Exchange computers ethernet feeds. That would be a bombshell of the first order.
Like I said, look beyond the technical press and look at the financial press. Goldman Sachs is coming to the poker table with a marked deck and it can be statistically proven.
HFT is a smoke screen. The frequency of trading is moot. if I can look at the world's trades before they hit the exchange and process and effect NBBO, I now have a license to print money. Doing it high frequency just makes the printing press run faster.
All about PR and nothing about trade secrets? (Score:2)
I'm sure this is all about PR and has nothing to do with trade secrets. "Government" Sachs isn't terribly popular right now and they really would like to maintain a low profile.
And I'm sure part of the defendant's strategy is to shine particularly bright lights on directives from Goldman management about HFT and how they wanted to control/manipulate markets.
This kind of testimony in open court would be a PR disaster for Goldman and they know it. The last thing they want these days is another "Evil" tag.
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Oops, I should have read farther. What the report actually says that the HFT algorithms caused increase market volume and started a positive-feedback loop with the sell-order script. This caused a "liquidity crisis" (all the algorithms were trying to sell and nobody was buying) so the price crashed. As the price went down, the various HFTs were swapping shorts back and forth to take advantage of the falling prices, but couldn't offload the total amount of sell orders, so the exchange circuit breaker kick
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Q? Is that you?
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/All_Good_Things [memory-alpha.org]
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Vast disparities in wealth are incompatible with democracy and civil society. You can't have either when one small group of people gets to play by a completely different set of rules than everyone else. Given that you, personally, are more likely to get hit by a meteor and then struck by lightning than you are to accumulate your own vast wealth, and given that you, personally, benefit immensely from living in a democratic civil society, you, personally, should be against vast disparities in wealth. This applies to the 99.99 percent of people who will never accumulate more than a million in assets in their lifetime. Why let that .01 percent make the rules? They are making the rules, but you are the majority, meaning, you are letting them make the rules. You don't have to let them do that.
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Perhaps because the last few times we've seen political action to enforce a relative parity of wealth, we've seen Russia and China become places that nearly no American would want to live. Some of this is due to propaganda (zomg, Socialism!), and some of it is due to the massively authoritarian nightmares and abuses of human rights that we've seen them devolve into.
It's possible that our belief that it's better here is a delusion. I doubt that, though.
Re:Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps because the last few times we've seen political action to enforce a relative parity of wealth, we've seen Russia and China
Hint, Russia and China are doing it wrong. Hell, their income inequality [wikipedia.org] is barely any better than ours. Fact is you can lower income inequality through policy without becoming a totalitarian hell hole. Look at central Europe.
Re:Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Socialism does not necessarily involve gulags and show trials, in the UK we managed to introduce a national health service, state pensions and so on without recourse to violence, because the vast majority of people agreed with them.
Hold on a sec (Score:3, Insightful)
Vast disparities in wealth are incompatible with democracy and civil society. You can't have either when one small group of people gets to play by a completely different set of rules than everyone else. Given that you, personally, are more likely to get hit by a meteor and then struck by lightning than you are to accumulate your own vast wealth, and given that you, personally, benefit immensely from living in a democratic civil society, you, personally, should be against vast disparities in wealth. This applies to the 99.99 percent of people who will never accumulate more than a million in assets in their lifetime. Why let that .01 percent make the rules? They are making the rules, but you are the majority, meaning, you are letting them make the rules. You don't have to let them do that.
Most people who accumulate a million bucks are fairly ordinary, not the type you tend to hear about on television. Middle aged people who've worked their whole lives and spent frugally.
You're right that people ought to be under the same law, but what makes you think some people are above the law? We regularly hear about CEOs and other types who end up in jail. Apparently really nice jails, but jails nonetheless. Sure, money makes some people more powerful than others, but mostly you have to stay within the
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't have to let them do that.
How do I "don't let them do that?"
What are my legal, efficient means to initiate change and reverse the inertia of corrupt lawmaking?
(I hope you don't say "voting" and mean it seriously)
Re:Money (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the core reason why nothing will change in this country. If everyone thinks they will get to the top, nobody will want to put any effort into changing the system. We have a majority of the population that is jumping up and down for some of the table scraps, but they will never, ever become part of the stupid-elite. The fact that so many people are delusional enough to assume that money equals happiness proves that we have to many people that have their priorities mixed up. Money isnt going to fix your life its only going to complicate the many problems you already have that you are not dealing with on a personal level and those problems will be transferred to innocent people because you have money and dont know how to use it. I dont hate you for it. I feel sad for you wasting your life for something that matters little in the grand scheme of things. :(
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So someone that comes up with a damn good idea that improves lives worldwide shouldn't be allowed to be comfortable in life for his/her work?
There's a big difference between being comfortable and being a billionaire, you utter twat.
Personally speaking, I will take great pleasure in joining the millionaire club at some point down the road: you can hate me all you want, I won't care
As Chesterton said, to be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep about $500 in checking to pay bills. The rest of the cash is in my home, which when the whole freaking thing ends up collapsing, I will have access to my money
What makes you think your money will be worth anything if everything collapses?