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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?"
Courtrooms have been closed several times before to protect trade secrets. The Supreme Court case Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto opinion points out that once secrecy is lost, the property interest is forever destroyed and that it should be protected during the process. There are many other ways to preserve secrecy so closing the courtroom may not be necessary in all cases but that may be the only way to protect the trade secret in this situation.
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.
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
http://www.limebrokerage.com/contact_us.shtml
http://www.ften.com/buy-side-products/vx-velocityxpress.html
They all offer colocation services.