Isn't It Ironic?

[Stewie]

Goldman Sachs had "trading" software stolen by a former employee. GS raised hell about it and were all high and mighty until they let the cat out of the bag without really knowing it.

The arraignment in U.S. District Court in New York of a former Goldman Sachs employee accused of stealing the program. The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti, was quoted as telling the court: "The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways."

In its letters to the SEC and CFTC, GATA wrote: "The assistant U.S. attorney’s comment can be construed to suggest Goldman Sachs considers its own manipulation of markets to be fair, while such manipulation by others would be unfair. The court proceeding described in the Bloomberg News story would seem to impugn all markets in which Goldman Sachs trades."


GATA asked each commission "to investigate Goldman Sachs’ trading program urgently and report its findings publicly."

GATA is an educational and civil rights organization that seeks to restore free markets.


It has long been suspected that GS manipulates several markets. Now it appears the accused thief stole the golden goose from GS and the SEC will now want a look at said software. This could be justice served, at last.

[Buehler445]

I doubt justice is served. There may be a LOT of money flowing out of GS to rectify it, but I doubt anything major happens.
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[Stewie]

I doubt justice is served. There may be a LOT of money flowing out of GS to rectify it, but I doubt anything major happens.
Posted via Mobile Device

This isn't some little unintentional mistake, it's fraud at the highest level. Look what happened to Enron and their execs and multiply it by 1000. That being said, GS has friends in high places, but that only gets you so far. At least everyone will see GS for the dirtbags they are.

[Baby Lee]

http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=209996

[Mr. Flopnuts]

Oh fuck yes. Bury those motherfuckers. 1 night only: Burning bitches at the stake!

[PostRockPablo]

Don't ya think?

A little tooooo ironic..and I really do think...

[Pioli Zombie]

Don't ya think?

A little tooooo ironic..and I really do think...

Its like somethin somethin on your wedding day. Its like that good advice that you just can't take...
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[KILLER_CLOWN]

Friday, July 10, 2009
Rogue Algorithms And Other Mutually Assured Destruction Program Trading Alternatives

Posted by Tyler Durden at 12:54 PM
Submitted By Joe Saluzzi Of Themis Trading

Why Institutional Investors Should Be Concerned About High Frequency Traders

By Sal L. Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi

A Themis Trading LLC Mini White Paper

It is now generally understood that high frequency traders (HFTs) are dominating the equity market, generating as much as 70% of the volume.

HFTs are computerized trading programs that make money two ways, in general. They offer bids in such a way so as to make tiny amounts of money from per share liquidity rebates provided by the exchanges. Or they make tiny per share long or short profits. While this might sound like small change, HFTs collectively execute billions of shares a day, making it an extremely profitable business.

Why should institutional or retail investors care? After all, aren’t HFTs adding liquidity? That’s what they and the exchanges, who court their business, say.

There’s a lot to worry about.

1. HFTs provide low quality liquidity.

In the old days, when NYSE specialists or NASDAQ market makers added liquidity, they were required to maintain a fair and orderly market, and to post a quote that was part of the National Best Bid and Offer a minimum percentage of time. HFTs have no such requirements. They have no minimum shares to provide nor do they have a minimum quote time. And they could turn off their liquidity at any time. When an HFT computer spots a real order, the HFT is not likely to go against it and take the other side. The institution is then faced with a very tough stock to trade.

2. HFT volume can generate false trading signals.

This can cause other investors to buy at a higher price, or sell at a lower price, than they would otherwise. A spike in HFT volume can cause an institutional algorithm order based on a percentage of volume to be too aggressive. A spike can attract momentum investors, further exaggerating price moves. Seeing such a spike, options traders can start to build positions, which, in turn, can attract risk arbitrage traders who believe there’s potential news that could affect the stock.

3. HFT computer servers are faster than other trading systems.

Because most HFT servers are co-located at exchanges, they can beat out institutional or retail orders, causing them to pay more or sell for less than they should have for a stock.

Then there are the “what if” problems that could be created by HFTs.

1. What if a regulation like the uptick rule were enacted?

Volumes could implode and stocks that appeared highly liquid could become extremely difficult to trade with wide spreads and no depth in the quote.

2. What if a “rogue” algorithm entered the market?

Many HFTs are hedge funds that enter their orders into the market through a “sponsored access” arrangement with a broker. Many of these arrangements do not have any pre-trade risk controls since these clients demand the fastest speed. Due to the fully electronic nature of the equity markets today, one keypunch error could wreak havoc. Nothing would be able to stop a market destroying order once the button was pressed.

Gives new meaning to the term “mutually assured destruction?”

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/rogue-algorithms-and-other-mutually.html

[KILLER_CLOWN]

Friday, July 10, 2009
Breaking News: http://www.xp-dev.com

Posted by Tyler Durden at 3:20 AM
Critical disclosures by Bloomberg underway, but here is the Aleynikov server: http://www.xp-dev.com/

Xp-dev.com is registered to London resident Roopinder Singh, who describes himself on a blog linked to the site as a trading systems developer working in London’s financial services industry. The site offers “subversion hosting,” letting users track current and previous versions of programming code and other documents.

Singh told his customers in the blog yesterday that he’d been contacted by “local UK authorities,” who had seized his hard drives to examine them and shut his service down for 45 hours, beginning on July 6, two days after Aleynikov’s arrest.

“It turns out that some idiotic moron a user had uploaded data on to the service that he/she was not authorized to have,” he said, crossing out the words “some idiotic moron.” “This is your basic intellectual property theft case here.”

Oh Roopinder, if only it were that simple. More from Bloomberg:

Aleynikov told McSwain he used the server on other instances.

“I have uploaded files to svn.xp-dev.com on multiple occasions over the last couple months,” Aleynikov said in the FBI statement. The phrase, “over the last couple months” is crossed out.

It was unclear if he used the server to store Goldman software or other code.

“The files that are proprietary information of Goldman Sachs has not been shared with any individual or corporation,” Aleynikov repeated near the conclusion of the three-page statement.

In the statement, Aleynikov laid out what had happened from the downloading of the files to their transfer to the server and his retrieval of them from it. He said that on June 5 he “created a tarball in an effort to collect open source work on Goldman Sachs server to which I had an account.”

Tarball

A tar file, which is sometimes called a tarball, is a compressed file.

“I had previously worked on the files,” he said.

He said he encrypted the files, then erased the encryption software and the tarball.

“I then erased the bash history,” he said, referring to a method of recalling commands used in previous computer sessions.

Goldman security measures prevent such deletions, which tipped the firm off to his activities, prosecutors said.

Aleynikov said in his statement that he downloaded the Goldman software to his home computer, his laptop computer and his thumb drive.

“The reason I uploaded to svn.xp-dev.com was because it was not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” Aleynikov wrote. The phrase, “not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” was crossed out and he added: “I wanted to inspect the work later in a more usable environment.”

And here is the story from Singh:

“Outage” - a word that comes with so much burden and disgust, especially nowadays with the advent of cloud computing, most users expect a full 24x7 uptime, regardless of the service. However, the reality of it is that even services like Google App Engine can go down. Most of these outages are down to very common events (and boy, we’ve heard our share of them!) like disk failures, security breaches, network outages and even data center fires. Hey - even lightning can strike the cloud, right ?

When XP-Dev.comdisappeared off the internet on 6th July 2009 at 15:20 BST, I immediately thought that it was one of the usual reasons. However, when I realised that allXP-Dev.com servers (we have a few of them) disappeared, I began to panic. For a moment, I thought that something really bad had happened – I mean, to the extent that it was the end of the internet as we knew it.

After trying to diagnose the situation for 30 minutes or so, I called up the service providers and they basically told me that they couldn’t tell me what had gone wrong. All they could say was that their infrastructure was working fine, but they had to disconnect my servers. Apparently, the only person that had the authority to tell me what was going on had gone back home for the day, and I had to wait till the morning. I found that really odd, and began to panic even further! Was it a security breach ? Was one of my processes doing something really sick and affecting others in the data centers ? Or maybe Goblins just came out and started eating away at the data center. I even re-read their Terms of Service and Policy Notes to double check that I had not done anything “out of the ordinary”.

At around 9pm BST, I get a call from the “local authorities” (I can’t say who they are right now, but rest assured that they are valid local UK authorities that have jurisdiction in UK) saying that they wanted to visit me at home to discuss XP-Dev.com. I just blew my mind at this point – what in the world happened on XP-Dev.com to make these guys visit me at home ?

It turns out that some idiotic moron a user had uploaded data on to the service that he/she was not authorised to have. This is your basic intellectual property theft case that we’re talking about here. The local authorities had to take all the server hard drives for examination, and I was told that someone will be in contact with me the following day (i.e. 7th July 2009).

The following day, I was on the phone trying to get them to speed things up, but to no avail. Apparently everyone was trying their very best. Later in the day, I did get a call that mentioned that the hard disks will only be returned to the data center the following day (i.e. today).

This morning at around 9am BST, the local authorities visited me at home. We got everything sorted out and the service was brought online at around 12noon BST.

The main issue here is that this case of IP theft is an ongoing investigation, and I really couldn’t tell you guys anything at all. In fact this whole blog post is the only amount of information I can let out even at this point.

Hell, I hate myself for doing that to you. It totally goes against every single grain of ethical business practices that I’ve grown to adhere to and love.

A 45 hour outage is inexcusable. But this is one of those WTF momentsthat I just have to take in and suffer with my beloved users. It is really uncommon for any service on the internet to go through this sort of “experience”. Having said that, any service on the internet is exposed to this risk where certain users upload/share information that they do not own.

There will be some changes to XP-Dev.com in the coming weeks to avoid the lengthy delays that the authorities took to return the hard drives. In fact at one point yesterday, I was contemplating to disable creation of new repositories for Free users, but then, two minutes later, immediately retracted from the idea thinking “Why should thousands upon thousands of users get affected due to one user's silly actions?”.

The one thing that I will definitely do is bringing the servers closer to home (UK). It will require purchasing some hardware and the co-location costs, but I think it will be a worthwhile investment – for you and for me. In fact, from the quotations that I’m looking at, the new servers should be faster (which is always a good plus point).

I do apologise for the prolonged outage, but I hope you do understand that a lot of it was out of my control – I just couldn’t pull off a Chuck Norris and get those hard drives back, now, could I ? :)

Everything should be back to when it was taken offline on 6th July 2009. If there are any questions, please do put them in the comments below, or just raise a support ticket.

More developments to be logged throughout the night.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/breaking-news-httpwwwxp-devcom.html