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Ex-Goldman Sachs Programmer Found Guilty
Readers twoallbeefpatties and ngrier wrote in essentially simultaneously about the guilty verdict in the trial of former Goldman Sachs computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov. We've discussed the case several times before. The trial itself was sealed from the public to prevent discussion of GS's high-frequency trading system. Reader ngrier summarizes: "After just three hours of deliberation, the jury found Sergey Aleynikov guilty of intentionally stealing proprietary Goldman Sachs code. As he had admitted copying the code as he was preparing to join a startup competitor in 2009, the case hinged on the intent. He faces up to 10 years in prison."
High frequency trading has no social benefit. If wikileaks could leak all source code of that type I would applaud it.
Steal from a few hundred million, get fat bonuses....
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Goldman Sachs are the criminals. Why aren't they all on trial too? All this guy did was steal a little code. They've been robbing their customers for years.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
But it proves once again, wealth is not about creating value, but owning it.
Ten years for just stealing a little code. Damn you would think he gambled with investor funds on risky phantom products that sent the whole economy into a tail spin. But I guess that's what they call their business model.
high frequency trading demands you have the screamiest servers the shortest fibre optic hop away from wall street. meaning it turns what should be an egalitarian marketplace of equals into one where those with the most power and resources are able to extract a tax of sorts on regular traders by engaging in high speed tricks
just put a "heartbeat" into the market: all trades operate on a FIFO queue that is released on a regular interval: every 3 seconds, every second, every 10 seconds, every 500 milliseconds, whatever: the point simply being that no trades can operate faster than this "heartbeat", thereby putting all trades on an equal footing
otherwise, the stock market will be abused by its richest players. when that happens, small time and mom and pop stock market traders will feel abused, and opt out, and the market will ossify into corruption
the point of a well-regulated marketplace is to keep the marketplace fair and healthy and a place of equals. so deny the powerful this unfair leverage and unfair ability to siphon off a tax on all other traders just by doing little fast tricky trades that have no real value whatsoever other than to take money from the slower smaller players
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
is the fact that we have apparent non-experts deciding whether what he took was in fact proprietary, and the case is sealed so we cannot judge for ourselves. On the other hand, if what he took was legitimately open source, how comes it he couldn't have downloaded that elsewhere and saved himself a trial?
Dog is my co-pilot.
so basically you're saying trading should be more like a turn-based RPG and less like a twitchy FPS?
The Taiwan and Korea markets are like that, the only thing such delays achieve is to decrease the total amount of shares traded in a day, hence reduces the overall market value and shifts wealth to other markets that do allow continuous unfettered trading.
What you don't realise is that a great deal of shares/commodities these days are being traded in dark pools and mini electronic markets, those traditional NYSE or NASDAQ style exchanges are looking to be a thing of the past and only being used as a reporting medium for the exchange of shares from external/independent markets.
I say let the markets be as efficient as they can be.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Very true. The concept of value investing has been long lost to the market. If any of you are traders, or if you are looking at getting into trading, I recommend checking out the book Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor by Seth A. Klarman.
:)
I read this book, and after was astounded with how true it rings, not because of the money I earned (I don't even invest), but because of the insights it provides into the greediness and irrational nature of the market.
To summarize the book, buys stocks based on what you think their value is, which actually requires doing a value analysis on the stock and buying when it is undervalued, and selling when it is overvalued, as to just getting sucked into the latest get rich quick stock or bond at the height of its balloon, only to have it pop.
Good luck finding a copy under $500 dollars. This is a rarity. It was once deemed the most stolen book from libraries in the world by the NYT.
But I may have seen it available on torrents before
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
"If you're going to commit crimes, son, start with the legal ones."
This was at Crocker Bank in the 80s, which was subsequently bought by Wells Fargo, who laid off thousands, including me. When that happened, I suddenly saw his point.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
LOL
i'm showing my age, but there was a mod some maniac made over ten years ago of id's original doom fps. you were let loose in a level full of monsters, and each monster correlated with a process running on your computer. when you shot a monster (with a shotgun, preferably), the process associated with that sprite was terminated as well. brilliant, and insane
now i want to see someone write a mod where you execute trades instead of processes. that would brilliant and insane x10
i think on the original mod there was a label floating above each sprite's head, so you knew what process you were terminating. although, it would be more fun if there was no label, so you wouldn't know if you were going to freeze your os, crash the system, or just end some minor helper service. likewise, with a trader fps mod, you should just go into the level with a shotgun and a bunch of sprites, not knowing if you blowing a couple of thousand on a major amount of a tanking stock, or making $10 off a useless tiny put option trade, or whatever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
efficient?
you are basically advocating for shady marketplaces that are rigged by their most entrenched players. if the markets are not egalitarian, the markets are abusive, and you are cursing the entire concept of trading to the realm of corruption, which will decrease the overall market value a heck of a lot more than what taiwan and korea are suffering, i assure you
for a market to be truly free, that is, a meeting place of equals, it must be in the full light of day and be highly regulated. truly "free" marketplaces, that is, without any regulation at all, are, as a rule, dominated, abused, and taxed by their largest most powerful players
a marketplace that is regulated and transparent and well-policed and well-understood, is a marketplace that attracts investors with confidence and trust in what they are getting into. your dark marketplaces meanwhile are more a deal of who you know. the definition of nepotism and all manner of ills that befall fools that get involved in such financial chicanery
your way is the way of financial doom. you are ignorant of financial history. the fate of such dark marketplaces is well understood and oft repeated throughout history
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From the information in the article, I'm not sure I understand what the case is based on? If the code was open-source, doesn't he have license to use it?
Are they claiming that the "open source" code is actually proprietary and cannot be used by anyone? Or that just their employees cannot use it? Or that the contract between him and the employer somehow prevents licensing the open source code? The article claimed there was no question that he violated the confidentiality agreement. Or did he disclose some proprietary information while copying the "open source" code? Or is the case not based on their ownership of the code that was copied, but something else? Or did he copy it directly from their servers and not use the "open source" versions of the code from external sources?
Guess there are many unanswered questions in this article. But guess it's difficult to understand how big organisation's rules work. Maybe there are some rules that are difficult to understand by normal open source developers. (but if the rules are difficult to understand, how they expect people to follow them?) Banks might have different rules compared to normal companies? More strict maybe...
Good luck finding a copy under $500 dollars.
Surely an investor, of all people, should see the value in doing another print run!