

Erlang scores a marketing coup - leoc
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-case-of-quant-trading-industrial.html

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Maciek416
One of the most fascinating posts on HN in a long time with a headline that is
almost completely non sequitur. "Erlang scores a marketing coup"? Seriously?

This is a story about industrial sabotage at Goldman Sachs!

~~~
madair
Industrial sabotage involving the theft of software written in Erlang which
keeps Goldman Sachs quite literally one of the most powerful financial groups
in the world.

There are multiple neato headlines that could be written for this, I wouldn't
have chosen this one, but it's not a non sequiter at all.

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spitfire
That is very cool. But i'm not surprised. High reliability, distributed
computing and maintainability is key in financial sector. I just can't wait
for the code to be posted on some torrent site I'd love to see it.

My own personal trading system is written in ADA with spark for reliability
and determinism. So I'd love to see what drove them to decide on the
technologies they've used.

EDIT: The absolute best part is at the end of the affidavit. The guy tries to
defend himself by saying he was just moving some open source code off the
system. After tarballing it up with their proprietary trading system, and
encrypting it. Who wouldn't believe him?

On another note, if anyone wants to hack on a (soon to be) open source trading
platform, get in touch.

~~~
troystribling
How could a trade be executed in microseconds considering that light travels
300m in 1 microsecond? It would seem that low latency connections to NASDAQ
trading systems would high priced real estate. Is this something that NASDAQ
sells?

~~~
spitfire
Yes, the nyse, nasdaq and such rent floor space for systems. You get a high
speed(low-latency), unencrypted (low latency), unpassword protected (low-
latency), low-latency connection with very low-latency characteristics
directly into trading engines.

They go to great lengths to ensure low-latency performance. Currently there'll
be tons of hifi hedge funds upgrading to nahalem processors and measuring how
much faster each individual instruction is. Cutting fiber optic wire to the
exact length to lower latencies, then measuring to make sure they don't have
any retransmits due to bounceback, etc.

If you're able to reliably make $0.01 on each trade you'll be more than
willing to spend hundreds of millions on hardware. Microseconds matter,
because they add up to milliseconds.

------
leoc
Attention managers! What is the black magic stealth technology behind feared
Goldman Sachs and its whispered microseconds-fast automated trading systems?

Serge has been pretty active online, it seems.:
[http://www.google.com/search?q=Serge+Aleynikov+caml+OR+ocaml...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Serge+Aleynikov+caml+OR+ocaml+OR+erlang)

~~~
tedunangst
"What is the black magic stealth technology behind feared Goldman Sachs and
its whispered microseconds-fast automated trading systems?"

Apparently SNMP.

~~~
leoc
Old and well-established enough that no-one is going to mistake it for a
silver bullet.

------
tedunangst
Wow, that's some wild speculation at the end. "Shouldn't all market
participants be aware that there is some rogue code in cyberspace that can be
abused by the highest bidder, who very likely will not be interested in
proving the efficient market hypothesis?"

Doesn't the new owner of this "rogue code" still need money to make stock
transactions? Was GS's interest in running the code proving economic theory,
or was it making a buck? If you whistle the code into a pay phone, does it
launch the nukes?

~~~
moe
_Was GS's interest in running the code proving economic theory_

Ofcourse not. They (or at least the author of the article) are just crying us
a river because someone stole their cash cow. I can only say: If a large part
of their profit was truly based on automated trading by that software then
perhaps they should have protected it better in first place? Or is homework
now optional when you're in a position to cry for government bailouts?

Anyways, if there's really a software to print money (which this article seems
to suggest) then could someone _please_ send me a copy? I'm very curious about
this efficient-market theory and would really like to help to prove it...

------
sutro
Great article, terrible HN headline.

------
leoc
On Paul Murphy's FT blog:

[http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/07/06/60561/the-
great-g...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/07/06/60561/the-great-
goldman-black-box-heist/)

> For what it’s worth, Aleynikov told the cops that he thought he was just
> accessing “open source” files on which he had worked, and only later
> realised he had accessed more data than he realised. He’s also denying that
> he distributed any of Goldman’s proprietary code.

------
gojomo
This sounds like it could be a movie. Who's the Clarence Beeks?

------
rjurney
Steal This Erlang

------
sho
The author makes wild speculation about "rogue code" but from the technology
in use it doesn't sound as much some kind of super-high-tech world-dominating
intelligent decision algorithm so much as just a specialised, high volume,
distributed message queue.

I guess other firms _might_ be interested in how GS approached the problem,
but it's a quite a leap to state that the matter "could (and likely should)
become a matter of National Security".

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jcapote
Absolutely fascinating.

