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Goldman Sachs Automated Trading Replaces 600 Traders With 200 Engineers (technologyreview.com)
Goldman Sach's New York headquarters has replaced 600 of its traders with 200 computer engineers over the last two decades or so, thanks to automated trading programs. (Though, the effort to do so has accelerated over the past five years.) "Marty Chavez, the company's deputy chief financial officer and former chief information officer, explained all this to attendees at a symposium on computer's impact on economic activity held by Harvard's Institute for Applied Computational Science last month," reports MIT Technology Review. From their report: The experience of its New York traders is just one early example of a transformation of Goldman Sachs, and increasingly other Wall Street firms, that began with the rise in computerized trading, but has accelerated over the past five years, moving into more fields of finance that humans once dominated. Chavez, who will become chief financial officer in April, says areas of trading like currencies and even parts of business lines like investment banking are moving in the same automated direction that equities have already traveled. Today, nearly 45 percent of trading is done electronically, according to Coalition, a U.K. firm that tracks the industry. In addition to back-office clerical workers, on Wall Street machines are replacing a lot of highly paid people, too. Complex trading algorithms, some with machine-learning capabilities, first replaced trades where the price of what's being sold was easy to determine on the market, including the stocks traded by Goldman's old 600. Now areas of trading like currencies and futures, which are not traded on a stock exchange like the New York Stock Exchange but rather have prices that fluctuate, are coming in for more automation as well. To execute these trades, algorithms are being designed to emulate as closely as possible what a human trader would do, explains Coalition's Shahani. Goldman Sachs has already begun to automate currency trading, and has found consistently that four traders can be replaced by one computer engineer, Chavez said at the Harvard conference. Some 9,000 people, about one-third of Goldman's staff, are computer engineers.
Regarding your signature.
"Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has shown us how to defeat men like Trump. Learn from Dr. King's example."
I believe very strongly I learned a great deal more from MLK which taught me it's not necessary to defeat men like Trump. We should instead speak his language and try and make him see that it's important to represent us, not just try and make it into history books as the most famous president ever.
Trump has thus far only performed in ways that would rile the rabble. He's adopting historically proven methods of garnering support with absolute disregard to the health of the people to be able to leave on mark on the planet. He'll toss out a bunch of useless gun regulation because the loudest Americans will sing him praise for it. He'll try to build a wall that can be seen from space but will have no real impact. He'll have 100 million people marching in the streets singing "God Bless America" waving flags and naming their babies Donald. He'll be taught about in history books for a thousand years. He will be immortal.
So, if we want something from him. If we want to be represented. We have to see if there's something we can give him that he wants. He wants immortality. He wants to be more historically famous than even the first black president (who he seems to hate). How can we give him infamy and immortality so that he can give us something in return.
Remember Obama failed at absolutely everything he did in office. He used the RIAA and MPAA as the DOJ. He took a housing crisis and through money at it instead of offering a solution that could have worked... like for example, making the banks move people who could afford $100,000 houses out of $250,000 houses and people who could afford $250,000 houses out of houses that cost $500,000 etc... he pushed through bills with nifty names like ACA and "The new new deal" which sounded great but weren't worth the paper they were printed on since he didn't care what the bills said, as long as they had the right name and he got credit. He was a great guy and I loved him, but holy shit, he was so bad at being president, he deserves to sit at a dinner table with Clinton, Bush and Bush.
Most presidents are genuinely good people who genuinely want to do the right thing for the people. Even Nixon was mostly a good person. But what they all have in common is that they generally suck at it. The American democracy is in shambles. There are 400 million people who more or less only ever agree that they are better than each other. Otherwise the country is sick and it's sick enough to elect a person like Donald Trump.
Remember, Donald will be about the same as every other president. He'll do things, they'll be stopped or overthrown. He'll be reigned in eventually. A president can't just do whatever he wants. That was the whole point of building a country that was meant to deter the rise of a tyranny. But he can do some stuff and it would be very good if we could learn how to work with him to give him fame while giving us a better place to live. It is absolutely clear that he'll do just about anything to get an extra paragraph about how awesome he is in an encyclopedia. Let's see if we can make it happen.
Dr, MLK was not about defeating anyone. To defeat someone, you have to accept them as an enemy. MLK had no enemies. He embraced people and broke down barriers. If you really wish to do that man justice, you have to realize that there are far better ways to make the world a better place than to pick fights.