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?"

Comments

There is a good chance code will be revealed

[Stregano]

I could see the closed doors. If the guy says he didn't, and then they start pulling up source code, then I would personally not be happy if that source code was just shown to the world if I was working on a closed source project

Not Unheard Of

[al3k]

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.

Re:Unfair advantage

[HiddenL]

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.

Re:Money

[spun]

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.