I think this is bullshit. The facts on which it's based appear to be: 1. Someone working on high-frequency trading at Goldman Sachs was a Bad Person, as demons

I think this is bullshit. The facts on which it's based appear to be: 1. Someone working on high-frequency trading at Goldman Sachs was a Bad Person, as demonstrated by the fact that he seems to have leaked a big pile of GS's trading code. 2. The NYSE put out one report in which GS's trading figures were bizarrely omitted. (They've since blamed it on a "system error"; who knows whether they're telling the truth?) From which the author somehow concludes: 3. GS probably hacked into the NYSE's machines or connections so as to be able to snoop on everyone else's trades before they committed. Now, sure, #3 is possible. But the only evidence our author sees fit to provide is points 1 and 2 above, plus the observation that it sure would be profitable to do #3 if you could get away with it. (The reasoning, if you can call it that, seems to be: #2 suggests that there's more going on than meets the eye, and maybe GS were removed from the report because they'd done something Very Bad; Aleynikov knows a lot about high-speed trading systems; one thing an expert on that stuff might do that would be Very Bad would be to snoop on everyone else's transactions; so let's write a big long story that basically alleges that he did.) So either our author has extra information that s/he isn't owning up to, or it's bullshit (and either wrong or just lucky). The author's previous story alleges that Sarah Palin is addicted to amphetamines, on the grounds that she is quite thin and sometimes talks incoherently on camera. Bullshit seems like the simplest explanation here.