11 ms·
Goldman Sachs will open-source some of its trading software
- ForHackernews 8y agoHow much do we wanna bet this is just a recruiting gimmick?
- gfiorav 8y agoOh, you mean like them offering a VP position (without telling you maybe half of the people there are VPs)?
- z2 8y agoIt may be more like saying they support open source in the same way companies rushed to say they are green, for their image. The plethora of VPs is partly a sales thing, so that every client gets to meet with a VP. Just like how every sales person is a director or similarly inflated title at other companies. Hopefully one knows this before taking such a job! Edit: After RTFA, it seems to be 2.5 things: - Crowdsourcing ideas while getting everyone to conform to their platforms - Image improvement to appear innovative - Speculating: monetization of old code that doesn't actually work anymore
- chaosbutters 8y agojust like I'm a sr engineer but still basically do a tech's work. Inflated titles at companies is a joke
- kurtisc 8y agoAnyone who's seen or read American Psycho should be aware of that.
- ForHackernews 8y agoThat's just how title inflation works in finance.
- chadash 8y agothis is just how titles in finance work: analyst < associate < VP < executive VP < managing director* < C-level executive The lowest level managing directors typically have several additional managing directors between them and the C level executives. In other words, you can be in charge of a 15 person unit and be called a managing director or you can be in charge of an entire division of 500 people and make as much as some fortune 500 CEOs and be called a managing director. Generally, your clients are fairly sophisticated and know exactly where you are in the totem pole. In addition to just being a rung on the ladder, the VP title often also means that you are a corporate officer, who can enter into agreements on behalf of the company.
- JackFr 8y ago> The lowest level managing directors typically have several additional managing directors between them and the C level executives. Often called SMD (Senior) or EMD (Executive)
- geofft 8y agoThis isn't unusual/deceptive in the industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president > In business, "vice president" refers to hierarchical position that ranges from extremely senior positions directly reporting to C-level executives (in non-financial companies), to junior non-management positions with four to 10 years of experience (in financial companies). ... > In brokerage firms, investment banks and other financial companies, "vice president" is a seniority rank rather than denoting an actual managerial position within the company. It is a relatively junior position, usually does not denote managerial responsibilities and companies have a large number of vice presidents, perhaps as an inexpensive way for a company to recognize employees, or perhaps because of delayering when an employee can't be moved higher in the organization but still deserves recognition. In most cases, the title merely implies that someone is in a medium-seniority individual contributor role. I work in the same industry, and my boss is a vice president (and had been a vice president for years despite becoming a manager only last year); his boss is a vice president; his boss is a managing director; his boss is a managing director; her boss is the CTO; his bosses own the company. I'm at roughly a level 4 in Google terms, and at my next promotion I can apply for VP and at the one after that I must apply for VP, regardless of whether I stay on the IC track or move to the manager track. So that should get you an idea of what "VP" means. All of this was new to me when joining, though, and it would be nice to have it more publicly known.
- amyjess 8y agoA friend of mine interviewed for Goldman last year. All the senior software engineering positions were Vice Presidents. He told me that according to his friend who works there and got him the interview, none of them are comfortable advertising that. They all choose to put "Sr. Software Engineer" on LinkedIn instead of their actual titles because nobody outside finance would understand why they're a VP.
- maxaf 8y agoAs a general rule I assume that most “open source” software released by companies is just a recruiting tool. Some projects manage to form a community beyond the mothership, so there certainly exist exceptions, but others are to be approached with extreme caution.
- voisin 8y agoThis is quite a change from when they ruined a man’s life for using Github.
- geodel 8y agoNot really. If someone try to do something what they consider stealing, they will still pursue the case with all legal might.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- NowThenGoodBad 8y agoHey, serious question but off topic from the thread: You used the word "what" where we would normally use the word "that". I've heard this done during speech numerous times from everyone ranging from fluent native speakers to learning nonnative speakers. Was there a specific reason you did it here?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- losvedir 8y agoIt's a British dialect thing, but not sure if that's the case with the poster here. See: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162619/usage-of-what-for-that-or-than-in-bre https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/162619/usage-of-...
- mhh__ 8y agoEmphasis on a British dialect. There are many and most (by geographically area) don't use what in that context. Except for emphasis e.g. The way Jeremy Clarkson says "an ..." where he shouldn't.
- geodel 8y agoSorry. I am non-native speaker so very likely I am wrongly using 'what' in place of 'that'. After you mentioned I am feeling 'that' would be correct usage.
- holografix 8y agoMaybe pull request trolling could be a thing? Pull requests that print “why hasn’t anyone involved in the GFC gone to jail?”
- pantaloons 8y agoOf course, if this technology was able to price securities better than the market (the fundamental job of almost every market participant), it would be printing money and they would not release it. This is not the secret sauce, but probably an implementation of a set of standard well known pricing and risk models. That's still useful, and can be expensive to develop, so thanks Goldman.
- trpc 8y agoInvestment banks don't even have the secret sauce, hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies and D. E. Shaw & Co. are the ones that have it
- kranner 8y agoInvestment banks have proprietary trading desks that are effectively hedge funds.
- jen20 8y agoGS used to be nicknamed “the worlds largest hedge fund”. They have plenty of world class proprietary tech, but the OP is right: this is not likely to be secret sauce at all.
- JackFr 8y agoThat's Harvard's endowment. Harvard University itself exists at this point merely as a tax dodge for the $37 billion AUM hedge fund.
- ryeguy_24 8y agoI don’t think this is accurate. Regulators release the Volcker Rule to shut down prop trading at banks.
- govg 8y agoThere still exist principal investing groups, as well as market making groups that can contribute to the bottom line.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- UnpossibleJim 8y agoThis is an honest question, and forgive me if it's a bit naive, but if they release trading software to the masses under the assumption that the vast majority of users will make few changes, can they rely on the herd to buy enough stock in their software's predictions at a slower rate to get an uptick?
- infecto 8y agoTake it with a grain of salt since I did not see the actual source and the article is paywalled. They are probably just releasing the tooling, not actual strategies.
- blihp 8y agoAnd even if they do provide strategies, they would likely be obsolete/unprofitable ones as examples of how to use the system.
- manmanic 8y agoAm I the only one who thinks they want to push the market into applying strategies that they can then trade against? This is classic Wall Street, persuading the masses to take the wrong side of bets.
- i_am_nomad 8y agoThat was my first thought too. And even if that’s not what GS intends to do, it will still be the end result, because their non-public automated trading will quickly become adversarial to this.
- kyleblarson 8y agoAnyone who thinks GS is taking any action without the intent of profiting from said action is hopelessly naive.
- jkchu 8y agoBut them making a decision to benefit themselves is not necessarily mutually exclusive to a decision that benefits other developers and the OSS community. Your point is valid, but just want to clarify that it isn't necessarily all negative.
- alkibiades 8y agothat can be said of any corporation. or most humans
- mactrey 8y agoOr any life form, really.
- vortico 8y agoIt's likely not a huge profit decision, and the path to profit is likely very indirect. They did it probably because - it increases its brand awareness/respect for technical customers, potential job candidates, and business partners - it can teach finance and CS students about basic algorithms used in the industry. In some industries, it is healthier for a company's technical edge to not be so far ahead of competitors. - the open-source """community""" (whatever that is) can find bugs and extend the software for the benefit of GS. I highly doubt this is a motive, but it's a possibility/daydream.
- adenverd 8y agoGS has a track record of working well with the OSS community. They open-sourced and maintained GS-collections (now Eclipse collections), a highly-performant Java collections library that they had developed internally. They benefitted from community use and contributions, but no more than any other company that open-sources an internal project. GS benefiting from open-source doesn't imply malicious intent.
- kartan 8y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-is-making-its-trading-tech-open-source-2015-8?r=US&IR=T&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-is-making-its-... "Aug. 12, 2015, 12:33 Goldman Sachs is going the way of Google and Facebook. The investment bank is giving away some of its trading technology to clients through open-source software, according to The Wall Street Journal...." Am I missing something?
- AtlasBarfed 8y agoProbably a poison pill that Goldman has engineered countertrading schemes against. Not unlike the magic numbers the NSA suggested for various encryption schemes.
- r_singh 8y agoTo a regular software developer who uses (and does extremely minimal contributions) open source software regularly, this seems more for marketing / branding (even from an HR perspective) than for anything else (like a contribution without returns in mind). We're reading about how GS "will" open source some software on WSJ, it would be better to just see a blog announcement with a link to the repository.
- gcb0 8y agoit will probably make money, but this is the same as sp500 et al being public list of components. they know that showing their "secret" will influence the irrational market to folow suit, hence showing sp500 components will make more people buy into those and make sp500 even more profitable. this can be an attempt at the same for the new generation. if your algo is making money and it can benefit from a mass adoption of the same strategy (or more likely they have a secret tweaked one that takes that more into account) why wouldn't they offer it in the open?
- mortdeus 8y agoWhat about that dude who they put in jail for open sourcing software he developed in a personal side project while under contract with them? Didn't they like completely throw the book at him by charging him under that completely insane law the Computer Fraud Act?
- infinite8s 8y agoYou have a citation? The only case I know about is a programmer who ftp'd a whole bunch of internal code to a site in Germany before his last day of work.
- strgcmc 8y agoSergey Aleynikov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov
- Havoc 8y agoYeah that one. Was internal code (well derived from code off stackflow) but completely harmless. The response - GS getting the FBI to go after him was wildly disproportionate.
- tptacek 8y agoYou sound like someone who definitely has a lot of the surrounding context and some of the intimate details of this story. Can you tell us more?
- Naga 8y agoMichael Lewis writes about him in Flash Boys, his book from a few years ago.
- qohen 8y agoMichael Lewis wrote an article about Sergey Aleynikov for Vanity Fair which led him later to write, "Flash Boys" -- it's online and worth your time [0]. Some interesting bits include: * Advice and information that could keep a programmer out of jail. * There's the description of Aleynikov's jailhouse enlightenment -- there is no other word for it -- e.g. what his lawyer says: “Every time I would come to visit him in jail, I would leave energized by him,” she says. “He radiated so much energy and positive emotions that it was like therapy for me, to visit him. His eyes opened to how the world really is. And he started talking to people. For the first time! He would say: People in jail have the best stories. He could have considered himself a tragedy. And he didn’t.” * There's the discussion of how no one involved (except Aleynikov) actually understood anything about the case and how Aleynikov's attempts to help clarify things were used against him. * And, then, there's the piece de resistance, where Michael Lewis convenes a jury of cynical programmers -- i.e. some people who actually have a clue -- to meet Aleynikov and judge his actions (spoiler: their cynicism about the case is replaced with incredulity when they talk to him and realize he didn't care about Goldman Sach's "secret sauce" trading algorithms, etc.). (Also, Lewis discusses his article in a Q&A in Vanity Fair [1] where he gets to talk about his own reaction to it all). Again, well worth your time. [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma... [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/08/michael-lewis-on-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/08/michael-lewis-on-gol...
- beloch 8y agoGoldman Sachs does nothing that fails to profit Goldman Sachs. This might be just PR, in which case the code could be useful for some. However, they may be doing this is because they found something that they can exploit if other people are using this code. It might be nothing particularly bad for a given user, but if a big block of investors begin using code Goldman Sachs knows intimately, the market may suddenly start doing stuff that just happens to fall to Goldman Sach's advantage.
- qpotlpus 8y agoNo company does anything which doesn’t benefit them whether via tech development, attracting programming talent, reputation etc... That is why they are companies not humans. Don’t confuse the two or pile on GS just cause they are GS.
- SanchoPanda 8y agoPlease pretty please open source plottool
- alexeiz 8y agoI spoke with some developers from Goldman several years ago. They couldn't even access Github website from work. Open source software and libraries were not regarded well either. Things may be changing, who knows. My impression was that Goldman is one of the most restrictive places to work.
- mehdizare 8y agoOn Github, they only posted LICENSE, https://github.com/gg4real/gs-quant https://github.com/gg4real/gs-quant