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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.
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.
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GS was bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of $14 billion. How "smart" is their "strategy"?
GPL *WINK*
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.
Goldman will own the resulting intellectual property
This is non-free opensource, obviously.
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.
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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 )
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.
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!
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)
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