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Prosecutors Request Closed Courtroom For Goldman HFT Programmer's Trial
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?"
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.
And a desire to avoid getting fleeced is bad because?
Also you ignore that revealing code opens wide the doors to extensive competition.
That's bullshit. As opposed to the status quo where their HFT platform allows them to fleece individual investors by buying shares that they know will go up. I mean not that they expect to go up, but what what the price will be in the near future.
Goldman Sachs is the sort of scum that needs to be run out of the country by any means necessary.
You don't know what you are talking about. There I said it.
No really, don't take it as a flame. Start a company, inject some capital, and start co locating. There are plenty of organizations that allow you to just run software local to the exchanges if you can't go through the whole hassle of building out an entire trading infrastructure yourself. If you are complaining that all markets should have the same barrier of entry... I would argue that you are not playing the same game as an HFT shop. If you have the capital and can meet the risk requirements, by all means, please, start trading at the exchanges. They will all let you do it. I know it might come as a surprise but tons of people have more capital then you which they use in all kinds of ways, as an individual you don't have that leverage. Sounds to me like you are not free market at all.
Now that we got that out of the way, understand that HFT is actually creating much tighter markets. When you as an individual or institutional trader go to the market you are getting better prices because of the constant price pressure created by competing hft shops. Somehow people don't believe this, but the markets are much more liquid, the spreads are tighter. So as an individual you are not being 'scammed' out of a penny, you are getting a better price than you would be otherwise. Look at the tick in equities, notice how its been getting smaller over the past 20 years. People who think HFT is somehow causing them to get a worse deal on their trades, or that they are being front runned fundamentally do not understand how modern markets work. You should be very careful calling for regulation of something that you clearly do not understand.
As if Goldman-Sachs didn't make enough money on the first round of TARP
Too bad. If the US public didn't want to be chumps, they should have elected someone competent for president either in 2004 or 2008.
Patent law gives the government sovereign jurisdiction over the allowing or disallowing of a patentable process or device, considering all the national security clamps on patents in recent years.
And why would you think that? I don't see a valid argument here to rebut, just a big non sequitur.
Horse hockey. Your comment really has nothing to do with the original topic, you just took this chance to post a leftist screed knowing how most slashdot readers would mod you up for pandering to their juvenile sense of entitlement.