Slashdot Mirror
Goldman Sachs Will Open-Source Some Of Its Trading Software (wsj.com)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs is planning to release on GitHub some of the code that its traders and engineers use to price securities and analyze and manage risk. "The bank also is offering $100,000 in annual funding for engineers to build new applications using the bank's code," the report adds. "Goldman will own the resulting intellectual property, plus get an early look to invest in promising technology." From the report: It is Goldman's latest move to shed some of its trademark secrecy and share its once closely guarded technology. It is part of a broader shift at Wall Street firms to emulate Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook, which have opened up their technology to a community of enthusiastic developers. By letting outsiders tinker with its code, Goldman hopes to crowdsource new uses for it and earn the loyalty of computer-driven "quant" traders who have taken the investing world by storm.
Goldman's proprietary trading engine, known as SecDB, once made its traders the smartest on Wall Street. It is credited with helping the firm weather the 2008 financial meltdown better than rivals. But a postcrisis ban on proprietary trading has made it more valuable as a service offered to clients than an in-house moneymaker. Over the past five years, Goldman has been building SecDB's capabilities into a web application called Marquee, which now has about 13,000 users roughly split between Goldman employees and clients. The code coming to GitHub will allow users to interact directly with Marquee's data feeds, pricing engines and other tools.
Goldman's proprietary trading engine, known as SecDB, once made its traders the smartest on Wall Street. It is credited with helping the firm weather the 2008 financial meltdown better than rivals. But a postcrisis ban on proprietary trading has made it more valuable as a service offered to clients than an in-house moneymaker. Over the past five years, Goldman has been building SecDB's capabilities into a web application called Marquee, which now has about 13,000 users roughly split between Goldman employees and clients. The code coming to GitHub will allow users to interact directly with Marquee's data feeds, pricing engines and other tools.
Is it the smarts or a client API for their proprietary service which will remain closed?
The $100k funding + keep the copyright for derivative works makes it look very NOT open, more an audition for prospective employees.
What kind of fucking Jewish Open Source is this? lol
Just because they may the code available on github, does not mean that it will be licensed in such a way that makes it either Open Source or FOSS.
remove nospam. to email!
GS was bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of $14 billion. How "smart" is their "strategy"?
Uh if I was writing banking software for Goldman Sachs, I'd want $200k salary at least alone and that's me being generous. What's $100k going to do for 'engineers'?
Gee, what it someone analyzes the code, determines some weak spots in GS's algorithms and then uses the info to sucker trade them into bankruptcy? Too bad for them.
Oh yeah, let's tweak GS's bottom line and hedge funds for a meager 100k. Probably much less than having to pay one of their engineers for a year.
Even if they open-sourced their entire codebase, there's no way I could connect to the markets or wield influence the way that they do.
$100K: Yep, thats about the annual bonus awarded to the receptionists at GS. I guess they're pursuing the "Bigger Sucker Theory" of development.
Goldman will own the resulting intellectual property
This is non-free opensource, obviously.
It is market manipulation down to the nanosecond. And that is just the public securities markets. Wall Street firms have their own dark web markets you don't see and neither do the regulators.
Better off not giving your money to sharks and whores.
My understanding is they paid a lot of money 10-15 years ago to dig a tunnel from Chicago to New York city for the sole purpose of shaving a few ms off following the curvature of the earth. Not to mention they pay $$$ to co-locate their servers close to the NYSE servers, again to shave a few ms. Knowing this, how is knowing their algorithms going to do you any good?
Oh please, Goldman dudes, don't make me laugh. Anybody who can write the kind of stuff you hope for can easily pull down three times your entire reward budget in a year, at minimum. Nobody with the ability to write something worth real money is going to hand you copyright for that pittance.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Microseconds, not milliseconds.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
There's a paywall on the article. I'm not sure but perhaps the article is referring to this blog from 2017...
https://www.goldmansachs.com/c...
If you read through it, they're open sourcing their plumbing. There's no analytical components listed, just propriety systems they created for which equivalent technologies already exist.
In any case the access to real time market data is far more valuable than the intellectual property of the software processing it. Companies like Goldman Sachs know that their true advantage is their ability to buy and sell before anyone else has a chance purely because of the physical network connections these sorts of companies enjoy. They could give away all their software, it may allow you to garnish some insights on how they operate but it wouldn't reduce their competitive advantage.
it could be part of the strategy. release code with known problems, then write another algo to take advantage of that public code that everyone will attempt to use.
It's easier than you think.
Interactive Brokers has an API.
The hard part is that this is like the ultimate in software challenges.
Bugs cost real money, be it increased commissions or uncontrolled losses.
If there's a way to set a max loss circuit breaker, I'd be all for it.
y'all should stop posting this crap unless they actually release the source code outside of Microsoft.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Ass-raped in jail for their hijinks that led to the economic crash under Dubya..... so why the fuck are they still free?
My understanding is they paid a lot of money 10-15 years ago to dig a tunnel from Chicago to New York city for the sole purpose of shaving a few ms off following the curvature of the earth.
I thought the big brokers built microwave links from Chicago to NYC, to minimize the straight (great circle) distance. Even a dedicated fiber link requires numerous kinks and bends, around lakes (Michigan and Erie), rivers, towns, roads, and other rights of way, adding a lot of distance.
A tunnel with no curvature, straight through the Earth from Chicago to NYC, would be 15.9 miles below the surface at its deepest. The tunnel's length (709 miles) would be very slightly shorter than the distance of an (optimal) microwave link across the surface (710 miles). Even with Wall Street's budget, the ROI for that tunnel project might take a few centuries to recoup.
(Cool calculator for this stuff at https://codepen.io/iainmnorman/pen/oxvdqW )
Quick reminder that creimer let us know he averages about 30% returns per month investing penny stocks. Much higher than Goldman Sachs.
you can sachs my d*ck, dear goldman - no one sane and competent at the same time will work for you
What a load of crap is SecDB. SETS and Argus outperformed the shit out of it for equities. Only the politics of fixed income traders making oodles of money and backing their pet IT people caused the rise of SecDB, which was wholly unsuited for any higher volume trading. A dog with a crappy pedigree. Periodically at Goldman some Comp Sci Phd wanna be asshat would come up with a new language and virtual machine to solve a business problem. Anyone who does this just wants to build their own circle jerk of mastabatury self pleasure. Note to business people: anytime an IT person says that they first have to come up with a new language to solve your business problem rather than use any of the 1000's already extant, fire the asshole. The exception to this is as rare as unicorn scatology. Plus the idiots that supported SecDB used to write the shittiest performing SQL. It was so awful that one almost thinks that like the mythological psychic who gets 100% of the answers to a test wrong they must have had some deeper knowledge of SQL. However they were just incompetent, arrogent little fools. Run away from this turd. *Yes I know SecDB didn'y use SQL internally, but one of the few ways non-SecDB people could judge how these fools coded was when they used SQL to get external data. And boy they coded like crap.
Actually most of their influence, even in the algo department boils down to speed not cleverness.
following the curvature of the earth
OMG, I can't believe you idiots have fallen hook, line and sinker for the lizard people's plot to trick humanity into believing the Earth is not flat.
You see, if everyone found out that the world is actually flat, ummm...hmmm...ok, I'm not sure why they went to the trouble of building a dome over the entire flat Earth, and I'm not sure why they bother projecting circular shadows to trick us into believing in lunar eclipses, and blocking out the sun with special circular curtains to trick us into believing in solar eclipses, but you can be sure there's a fucking good reason why they've been going to that much trouble!
Look thru the code, whereever it says buy() change that to sell(), and whereever it says sell() change it to buy().
It will give you bad info and lose your money to Goldman!
I heard that same "circuit breaker" analogy a few days ago on a software engineering podcast and find I still hate it.
Anyone whose sole purpose is to exploit people to extract money from higher abstraction layers I have no trust for whatsoever.
Our monetary system simply doesn't work anymore. It used to be representative of work. Now its representative of how effectively one can game the system with some starting out with a massive head start in the game.
Fortunately, the quants at Goldman Sachs quickly found out that the Earth is flat. The deepest needed is a few feet. [NO sarcasm!]
Some stock exchanges uses miles and miles of coiled up fibre to slow down trading for people located physically near by, to put everyone on a level playing field.
https://youtu.be/d8BcCLLX4N4
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
Flash boys - HFT's. documented that I believe.
Some stock exchanges uses miles and miles of coiled up fibre to slow down ...
We have sixteen of those!
In our network testing lab, we have 16 spools of optical fiber, each is 50 km long, and we can run a signal through one, or a few, or all 16, to simulate up to 800 km (~500 miles) of network latency. Which is about the maximum distance covered by our corporate (utility company) network. Pretty cool testing tool, but I thought it was just off-the-shelf.