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Former Goldman Programmer's Conviction Overturned
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "The legal woes will soon be over for Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs Group computer programmer who had been convicted of stealing part of the Wall Street bank's high-frequency trading code. A federal appeals court overturned his conviction and recommended acquittal. We previously discussed this story when he was sentenced to 97 months in prison. It will be interesting to see their reasoning (an opinion is to be released) as well as what this may mean for other programmers developing high frequency trading code."
He took a copy of the code of an internal tool, not something that they sell to customers. Would you really consider it evil to save a copy of your log viewer, for example? The law was intended to protect sold products.
If you read TFA looks you find that, in their eagerness to get the maximum news and sentence, the prosecution chose the wrong statute to charge him under. If they had just treated this like any other case of illegally copying an employer's code and not tried to get cute with the "interstate commerce" bit, they would have had a rock-solid conviction.
For what it is worth, academic research indicates that HF trading significantly increases liquidity. The main people it hurt were the floor-based stockbrokers. There is a natural human tendency to detest the "middleman", who appears to generate nothing of value, in all economic endeavors. One notices it for market makes, car dealers store owners and so on. But middlemen actually do provide a valuable service to society. In Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon there is a fascinating study of the mutual resentment of the wood wholesalers, hardware store owners, and the public in the 1800s, even as everyone was getting much richer and healthier.
Because you aren't. If you were investing in a company, you'd be giving them capital to use for purchasing/hiring/research. Unless you're buying in an IPO or secondary, you're not giving the company any money at all. So it's not investing, it's legalized gambling where you wager on companies, not invest in them
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Actually, it would be better to simply get rid of algo trading by adding a $0.001 "tax" to each share traded. That would affect "real" trades very little, but would completely obliterate the profitability of algorithmic extreme-transaction-volume trading. To be absolutely clear we are not talking about your ability to trade stocks yourself through something like E-Trade, we're talking about brokerage houses doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day trying to carve additional profit for themselves. Have a look at this TED Talk on the matter that was posted to /. a while back for some further perspective.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html
The relevant bit starts at around 2:45.
So if a company has a good long-term outlook and I buy in, and the stock does well for a period of time, then six months later the CEO dies in a car accident and is replaced by somebody who immediately starts running the company into the ground, I shouldn't be able to exit my position and take what little gains I can before they become losses? You want me to just hold on and get fucked because the situation changed dramatically? Am I supposed to read the future? It's one thing to speculate, it's another thing to be in for a long haul and decide (rationally!) to abort when things take a turn for the worse.