Anyone can do that now, it's called buying shares in a successful mutual fund. But as the prospectus all say, past performance is no guarantee of future results which is true for them or the mythical expert swing trader who doesn't realize that this whole option thing exists. If you had the ability to break into a brokerage computer system, copying a customer's trades would be one of the least lucrative and most likely to be detected things you could do!
This was one stupid response if you don't mind me saying... 1. WTF it has to do with anything? 2. Nice to say, except you forgot to back it with an ARGUMENT. But since I am a nice guy I will give you another try..
I don't mind you saying, although you may get more out of life if you allow for the fact that you may have missed the point if you don't understand something rather than assuming the poster is stupid. It means that following a "successful" trader isn't nearly what it's made out to be. As evidenced by the fact you can already look at the universe of several thousand of the most successful professional traders (who run mutual funds), pick the most successful ones, and invest in them and not only copy their trades but get the exact value of those trades. Why not just do that, instead of assuming that there's some leprechaun forest with trader unicorns in it who can consistently successfully trade over the long term but who are too dumb to know how options work! The truth is if you screened broker accounts for successful traders you'd be statistically screening through thousands of accounts to find the people who had a one in a thousand chance of getting it right through pure chance. And if you screened that many accounts with those odds you're sure to find those couple of accounts, just like if you run a few thousand Monte Carlo simulation runs. We call that data mining in statistics. That tells you nothing about the chances that they continue to make those returns, and in fact in all probability they won't. I highly recommend the book Fooled by Randomness, it helps you grasp a probabilistic mindset you need to see avoid seeing patterns in random data and understand why past results have so little bearing on future results when you data mine like that. A good college level MOOC on prob stats is also a good idea, they're free and that particular course will really open your eyes to a lot you'll probably find fascinating. As to what you "should" do if you break into a brokerage account and are part of an organized crime ring, well I imagine you'd do identity theft on all the customers and open up credit under their identity which you max out and obviously don't repay, probably try to ACH or wire out as many funds as you could and launder the money, maybe make a bunch or market moving trades using other people's money to which you had an effectively opposite position in an account the mob owned....all tried and true proven core competencies of organized crime except maybe the last one. Why do some crazy stock following thing when it's so much easier to just steal the money!
I meant why haven't they come up with an algorithm to make lots of profits. They're good at programming thus they should create a method no one else has thought of with small risk.
How do we know they haven't? Obviously this is not something a hacker is going to advertise. Until there is an arrest and a court case, we won't know. Or a Bloomberg article titled: How Russian hackers stole the NASDAQ? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-17/how-russian-hackers-stole-the-nasdaq
Sig, if a hacker wants just the customers' data, it is way more efficient to hack Equifax and get 143 million persons data, instead of a broker with a few 10 thousands of traders. The point of hacking a broker is to have access to trading records. And hey, it doesn't have to be a stock trader, they can back a swing futures trader, just with much more leverage. Just like probably TST does with its best traders... Also if a broker can trade against its customers, so can a hacker... One can be an excellent hacker, but you need a good trader to understand whom to back and with what leverage. Anyhow, if I was a hacker, that is how I would do it...
Nobody knows how to use google anymore, including the OP: "Russian hackers allegedly breached Dow Jones' servers, stealing market-moving information for stock tips in an insider trading-driven attack." http://fortune.com/2015/10/16/report-russians-hacked-dow-jones-for-stock-tips/
I assume brokers, at least the decent ones have better security than most places. And why would you conceive such a complicated system with many unknowns -- the successful traders can turn unsuccessful at any moment. It makes much more sense to hack news providers, accountancy firms, law firms etc - less security (I assume) and you will know for certain what's going to happen. Mimicking a bunch of traders is just multiple times more complex.
You're not talking about hackers then, just talented traders. As I've said, there are already ex hackers and crackers out there who are now trading. Do you expect them to advertise that they were breaking the law years ago? Is that it? People as smart as that would never advertise or even talk about this, that's pretty clear to me.