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Goldman Sachs Trading Source Code In the Wild?
Hangtime writes "The world's most valuable source code could be in the wild. According to a report by Reuters, a Russian immigrant and former Goldman Sachs developer named Sergey Aleynikov was picked up at Newark Airport on July 4th by the FBI on charges of industrial espionage. According to the complaint, Sergey, prior to his early June exit from Goldman, copied, encrypted and uploaded source code inferred to be the code used by Goldman Sachs to process in real-time (micro-seconds) trades between multiple equity and commodity platforms. While trying to cover his tracks, the system backed up a series of bash commands so he was unable to erase his history, which would later give him away to Goldman and the authorities. So the question is: where are the 32MB of encrypted files that Sergey uploaded to a German server?
...or, perhaps last week was a short trading week which cut into the already-low trading volume. Did you by chance compare the overall volume levels when you came up with your theory?
I am betting you didn't because if you had, you'd see that the volume last week was way lower than the norm.
More likely, lots of GS traders just took the week off and went on vacation.
GS's code for program trading is all written in a proprietary programming language called slang and relies on a proprietary database (secdb).
The install for that is a hell of a lot bigger than 32 MB, so this is probably just a few trading algorithms that a pissed-off developer has copied away.
It will be largely useless without the slang and secdb components and will be totally unsafe to trade off without a sufficient source of historic data and reference data, correctly formatted and loaded into secdb.
The idea that this leak is likely to be in any way materially damaging to GS is frankly a joke to anyone with even a passing knowledge of how these systems really operate.
But don't let that get in the way of your paranoia about how the world works.
Not likely... since most financial institutions capture not only the commands, but the output to STDOUT/STDERR, and that is logged outside, upstream of the physical machine, using tools like PowerBroker, Sudoscript, and others.
I know, because I work for $LARGE_BANK, and we use it there. You can't just symlink ~/.bash_history to /dev/null, or unset HISTSIZE or any of that.. even the !shell trick out of vim doesn't help, because everything you type and everything it outputs, is logged where you can't wipe it out.
It would be like someone offering the secret of Coke to Pepsi - what do you expect Pepsi to do?
that very thing happened a few years ago - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5152740.stm
pepsi declined the offer and reported it as a theft of trade secrets.
If you had RTFA'd you might have gone to http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-case-of-quant-trading-industrial.html and read the affidavit - http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/Complaint_--_Aleynikov.pdf, you would see that (a) they have proof that the file was transfered (b) they know *exactly* which server the files were uploaded to and (c) Sergey Aleynikov has already confessed to copying the files.
Should be interesting to see how the police "generate" and prove the evidence on this one.
It's all there in the affidavit.
There is a long article in Rolling Stone magazine this month, The Great American Bubble Machine, alleging that banks control the U.S. government and that Goldman Sachs is one of the leaders of the corruption. Anyone wanting to know more about how the financial corruption of the U.S. government is operated should read the article. The article alleges that Goldman Sachs will use any manipulation whatsoever to get money.
This Slashdot comment, The Investment Banking cohorts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the **huge** winners, discusses some of the issues. The Slashdot comment links to the Rolling Stone article, but that copy of the article has been removed.
According to the Rolling Stone article, Goldman Sachs makes money mostly through corruption, not investment insight. Your tax money may be their profit: Goldman Sachs takes $12B Bailout, Hands out $14B Bonuses. (The article lists British pounds, the Digg article lists dollars.)
The corruption is not new. For example, see the May 13, 2002 article in Business Week, How Corrupt Is Wall Street? New revelations have investors baying for blood, and the scandal is widening Quote: "Consider Enron, which has paid $323 million to Wall Street in underwriting fees since 1986, according to Thomson. Goldman, Sachs & Co. (GS ) pocketed $69 million of that..." Enron, of course, went bankrupt when it was discovered the company was dishonest.
Beginning in 2002, Warren Buffett began very publicly calling derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction". That particular part of the corruption was caused by the removal of laws designed to prevent fraud, at the beginning of George W. Bush's first term. Nothing was done to reinstate the laws, and that's why we are suffering now. Why was nothing done? Numerous articles say the corruption was allowed to happen because Goldman Sachs people control the U.S. government's Federal Reserve Bank. To give a small indication of the level of corruption, the "Federal Reserve Bank" is not federal, there is nothing in reserve, and it is not a bank.