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Well let's be clear about the stakes of this. Firstly, the billionaire isn't going to lose anything - he owns a company with dozens of different strategies. The

Well let's be clear about the stakes of this. Firstly, the billionaire isn't going to lose anything - he owns a company with dozens of different strategies. The people who will lose out are the other engineers who designed and built those strategies and now can't use them anymore. Even the risk of those stategies being out in the wild opens them up to the risk of a competitor exploiting their expected behaviour, so lot's of their work is going to have to be re-engineered. Secondly, whilst $30m doesn't threaten the company, having former employees thinking they can walk off with the secret sauce does threaten the existence of the company. So it's not surprising the most famous example of this is the one that's going to get the strongest enforcement.

saiya-jin 8y ago
There is standard codified punishment for what you describe - it isn't anything special to quant trading, we can talk about secret sauce of many IT companies, or companies in general. Some dev walks out of Google with their Search code/data would be much more scary and damaging. What we see here is punishment for the sake of punishment, from person who is clearly amoral according to anything you can find on him online (quite a bit). All I say is I have no sympathy for him and the case, which btw even the company itself originally claimed would expire in +-August 2018. Yet they still go for revenge. That's pathetic and clear abuse of legal system from my viewpoint.