That's what they have been doing all along. Totally fashinating. It is also funny how Joe Shmoe get sucked into the stockmarket and spend hours to look for the holy grail or buy it from someone else...while at Goldman a team of scientists and I mean really hard core smart people are put together to develop a code for an institution that does high volume superfast trading. They talk about milliseconds. The code is worth millions of dollars. Now the code gets stolen, but for the normal guy nothing will change.
Shit, I knew this stuff was out there YEARS ago just watching the trade. If you needed a story like this to wise up.....
I love it. So you guys control both the hypotheses, and the conclusion. What exactly do you think you have proved, and what is your evidence? Do any of you program? Do any of you trade high frequency? Have any of you even worked for an institutional firm This is waaay less exciting than you think it is. His pay grade is too low to have seen the model. The model runs on top of his code, maybe. It is mostly mind numbing boring stuff to most traders what got stolen, although extremely important on the technology side because if it is not done correctly, the outcome is often losing money. He probably stole his "own" code simply because he couldn't remember all of it and he didn't want to duplicate the enormous effort over years again! It is only worth something to a programmer. Still, what he did was wrong.
yeah the guy probably zipped up the entire code branch so he can use it as a reference and reuse some of the utility classes later on when he has to redo this whole thing. A lot of programmers do it, it's a pain in the ass to rewrite all the utility classes. I really doubt he was trying to "steal" the code or doing any type of corporate espionage on purpose, just a computer geek. The article wasnt too clear, was he trying to upload the code into the german site as a way of getting it out of goldman, or did he already got it out of gs then uploaded on the german site (why?). either way it's insignificant, other than a good conversation piece among the IT crowd.
The program is worthless, in reality. However, Goldman Sachs claims otherwise, and had it insured against 'theft' for 20 billion. AIG was the insurer.
The performance of GS's quant strategy over the last two years has been beyond shit anyways- you would not want to run that code and expect to make any money whatsoever. I think I recall seeing the performance of one of their main quant funds and it was down like 60% from the peak and AUM for it fell hugely as well...
USD400,000 annual salary for such an important employee ?!! I think GS deserves it. And then there may be another version of the story: GS is mean to its employee , especially immigrant employees. " Why should I give you more, in Russia you can hardly got USD40,000 annually.¡° Then another investment bank recruited the Russian with 1.2 million salary plus fat bonus. GS now got irritated, they set it up and made the Russian looks guilty Just a possibility.