At 47, it's only a short distance from here to a stable economic bottom, though. And the data appear to be better than anticipated by the "economists". If this is in fact a hint that we're nearing the floor of the "L" bottom, that would be good for a lot of people.
"If this is in fact a hint that we're nearing the floor of the "L" bottom, that would be good for a lot of people"
We're not quite there yet. Besides ISM is just a monthly Survey I think and it would be better to look at service prices in the CPI to gauge the health of the service sector.
Maybe someone can scrape the green shoots off my windshield....seem to have been lost on the L Shaped Freeway and hit a truckload of them while riding in the unemployed lane.
.....the indictment against Sergey Aleynikov sure is moving forward with the "speed of light". Bound, gagged, and hustled away to a remote location by the FBI and their boss at GS.
Wouldn't a "floor" of an L bottom be when payrolls stop shrinking and downward pressure on wages slows?
It seems to me that fancy graphs aside, the two things to look for are stabilization in unemployment and the states balancing their budgets. Then we can look for green shoots.
Tim and Jim,
Either state registration-some states do sell dmv reg lists to dealerships, direct mail co's.
Most likely Jiffy Lube...Vin is picked up by manufacturer. They are then added to uniform list with specified dealer in area getting your data...
Some Aimee Mann lyrics for the post 4th of July Monday blues.
Fifty years after the fair
the picture I have is so clear
underneath the clouds in the air
rose the Trylon and the Perisphere
and that for me was the finest of scenes
that perfect world across the river in Queens
Fifty years after the fair
I drink from a different cup
but it does no good to compare
'cause nothing ever measures up
I guess just for a second we thought
that all good things would rise to the top
But how beautiful it was - 'tomorrow'
we'll never have a day of sorrow
we got through the '30's, but our belts were tight
we conceived of a future with no hope in sight
we've got decades ahead of us to get it right
I swear - fifty years after the fair
Fifty years after the fair
I live in tomorrow town
even on a wing and a prayer
the future never came around
It hurts to even think of those days
the damage we do
by the hopes that we raise
But how beautiful it was - 'tomorrow'
we'll never have a day of sorrow
we got through the '30's, but our belts were tight
we conceived of a future with no hope in sight
we've got decades ahead of us to get it right
I swear - fifty years after the fair
Florida aided Allen Stanford, suspect in huge swindle Florida regulators -- over objections by the state's top banking lawyer -- gave sweeping powers to banker Allen Stanford, accused of swindling investors of $7 billion.
The banks (bottomless money pits) are getting hammered today. Along with Alcoa. Yesterday they tried to spin that the Alcoa numbers wouldn't mean anything. idiots.
If your are in a investment and the returns make you think it may be a ponzi scheme make sure it is a huge ponzi scheme. And talk well in front of a camera.
The real problem could be that the GS code will make plain how GS has been able to game the other program traders. Remember, this isn't just front running their own clients, although that may be present, the GS prop trading has been able to play the other high frequency sharks like a quartet of fiddles. However has the code cannot only work out what buttons to push to get GS to jump, (in an automated fashion), but they can now also replicate what GS was doing to other proggies as well.
This has got to be turning some IT manager's hair white, being in supposed control of a system that can/will be billions in an instant in response to a set of triggers you thought would be meaningful, but now could just be arranged with the intent of getting you to commit billions...
this GS code theft could make things interesting in short term....
The reason the Dow isn't up 300 is because it is summer. The junior traders are on a short leash while the heavy hitters are diving the Maldives from the fantail of their ship "TARP on You II." These newbies are too low on the totem pole to be privy to the "Down is the New Up" memo. We'll just grind through the next 7 weeks and then tanned and rested the Hampton crowd will step back in and show these kids how it is done.
I thought about that too....why would they even let this see the light of day unless they already had an alternative?....
It's too bad that most people seem to ask only if GS profit will be affected instead of what that code has done to the markets. BTW is it not odd that volumes have crashed...
Read the affidavit. The guy encrypted the files, uploaded them to some file-sharing site in Germany, and then downloaded them to his home machine. In other words, he encrypted them for himself. He was attempting to steal them, not transfer them to somebody overseas.
The code is almost certainly still sitting on his home computer having gone nowhere.
I hate GS as much as the next guy, but most of the "reporting" on this story is just stupid. It is very clear from the affidavit what happened. The guy was changing jobs and decided to take some of his work with him. He encrypted it, uploaded it from work, and downloaded it again from home. He confessed to all of this when confronted, waiving his Miranda rights, claiming he was only trying to take "open source" code. That last part is a lie, but the rest rings true; he was trying to steal the code, not give it away (duh).
If you look at the thing at face value sure it's "nothingburger" but it does point out...in a large way.... just how *ucked our supposedly free market has become.
GS trying to get sympathy for using this guy as a scapegoat for a lack of security (and risk management) gee where have we heard this before!!!
What's even more funny is that the code in question was supposedly the "real deal" and this guy was paid $400k a year? That's what makes the surface story the nothing burger. Using it to bloat the market for it's own gain is the story. Too bad most don't see the connection(s).
He was just a software engineer. Don't be confused by the "Vice President" title or his pathetic attempts to inflate his resume.
I had a friend who got a job straight out of college as a "Vice President" at Merrill Lynch. That title just means you make more than $150k or something, which on Wall Street is pretty much everybody.
That GS engages in high-frequency automated trading is not exactly a secret.
He also did a very pathetic job of trying to cover his tracks. If you try to remove a .bash_history file and do not understand what you are doing, it comes back on its own. Guy was incompetent.
Sigh. I could be making so much more money if I simply sold my soul to the devil.
‘I don’t need to hire anybody new. I need to work my existing workers more.’
CR: That seems to make sense, but I wondered if it has been true in previous recessions (that a large number of part time workers - for economic reasons - became fully employed before the unemployment rate started to decline)....Looking back at previous recessions, it doesn't appear that there was a decline in part time workers (for economic reasons) prior to a decline in the unemployment rate.
People can work more hours without changing part- or full-time status.
"Full-time" can stretch from about 30-80 hours per week.
"Part-timers" have worked over 40 hours in the real world.
Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.
John Muir
Do yourselves all a favor, and get away from this ball & chain cleverly disguised as a computer, and go seek honesty in the wilderness...
Not One Cent, the "part time" is what people say in a survey - those numbers are from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and isn't related to how the company classifies them. So if people are working 45 hours a week - and call that "part time for economic reasons" - I guess they'd still be considered part time
Whoever is unlucky enough to be on the other side of the transaction. There's an interesting paper at Zero Hedge that explains it. Just because GS is at high speed doesn't mean the counterparty is; in fact, it's better for GS if the other party is a regular algorithm trader.
another overheard theory: GS is using this story to its advantage by bignewsing this nobody and using it as cover for a market reversal which they are front-running.
Although I would describe him as a "systems engineer" rather than "programmer". You don't get "microsecond latency" from Visual Basic. (Or from Windows, for that matter.)
But on a Linux machine, with a thorough understanding of how the internals work, it is not that hard. If you know enough to write a Linux device driver, then you know enough to do this guy's job.
Some businesses have a sticky caste system (social identity) with different benefits (health, etc.) for full- and part-time but hours worked can be elastic.
Just because GS is at high speed doesn't mean the counterparty is
Exactly. Counterparty could be grandma with her limit order that she put in months ago.
The exchanges are all electronic. Even I can place orders from my home machine and have them filled in less than 100 milliseconds. (Never mind why I know that.)
Goldman and others co-locate their servers in the same physical building as the exchange, so their latencies are less than 1 millisecond. NYSE has to keep beefing up their own capacity in order to keep these traders from going somewhere faster.
I just have one question (I hope) for you and others who are following this story.
Why was this guy arrested by the Feds on criminal charges when UBS (alleging something similar for three of their quants who went to Jeffries earlier this year) had to file a civil case for damages?
I'm not a fan of either ZH or Denninger, nor terribly paranoid about GS, but the case seems either absurdly overcharged or underreported as to what he did.
I don't know. UBS is a Swiss company, right? So maybe the FBI does not have jurisdiction?
The affidavit makes a big deal about the guy uploading to a site in Germany, or being in New Jersey when he connected to the machines in New York, etc... It is possible that to get the FBI involved the "crime" had to cross state and/or national lines.
It does not look to me like they moved particularly quickly. The crime happened at the start of June and it was almost a month before he got arrested. That sounds about right to contact the FBI, get them to ask questions, and so on.
Although I would not rule out preferential treatment. Law enforcement always seems to move faster when the victim is wealthy.
Sorry, I should have stated "anyone who is rationally following this story and attempting an impartial interpretation of the known "facts" in the case."
The real issue behind this story is how much of the volume on the exchanges is just a bunch of computers trading massive volumes to capture fractions of pennies per trade. Zerohedge had a story up last night that stated that 48.6% of the entire volume on the NYSE last week was program trading. A new record since the exchange has been tracking the data.
Buy and hold. For how many nanoseconds?
We thought SkyNet had its incubation in the military nets, but apparently it was really born in the data centers at the exchanges.
It also made a really big deal out of him being a "Russian immigrant" even though he was educated in the US and appears to have lived and worked here his entire adult life. I read some of his posts/commentary on various forums (google both Serge and Sergey), looked at his linked in profile and even watched his two YouTube videos.
Having looked through his publically available record, your explanation of him being in over his head makes more sense than the Russian spy spin. Still, you have to wonder why GS would make such a BFD over something a pretty low level employee did. (Having said that, I would love to make $400k/year, but it seems pretty far down the GS pecking order).
Good morning, doomers! Hope everybody had a great July 4th! Here's a weird little stat for you, the Associated Press "economic stress" index, which is evidently getting worse:
"He encrypted it, uploaded it from work, and downloaded it again from home."
So he RARed the file and stuck it up on rapidshare.com?
It may be contained then, if RS automatically deletes the file. The fact it's encrypted is a nothing burger, and there is no end to the number of people who would be interested in this file and willing to commit serious horsepower to cracking it. I'm just curious if someone somewhere cross-loaded the RS file to another filestorage system somewhere.
With consumer deleveraging and credit crunch - we cannot have any quick recovery - L is best case scenario. Speculative stock buying and PPT euphoria is no substitute for anything.
Credit is falling so much - private credit decreased by $1.8 Trillion is the first quarter, consumer credit by $90.7 billion (annualized). Household net worth down by $13.87 trillion.
There is no trigger for recovery - new technology, new markets, demographics, new ideas. Green is just a boondoggle and BRICs can only do so much. JPM and GS etc are just trying to create another bubble - it suits their ends not yours.
The ISM index 9and all these reports announced almost every day) increase market volatility and make it very hard for active investors to actually make money.
In my opinion, it is all a matter of market timing. It does not matter if it is gold, oil, or Microsoft, if you have access to good market timing signals, they will help you get in and out at a profit.
No guarantees in this business, but if they are right most of the time, you can still make $s.
In labor and delivery when the strength and frequency of the contractions decreases It is an ominous sign
gmgmq is still trading at $0.75. When is the music going to stop for these jokers speculating on that dead stock?
"non-manufacturing industries" sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's all double-plus-good.
sort of like our non-banking banks....
whaddayamean not a green shoot, it's better than expected!
......how do we say that: "We're getting worser, slower?
Market going back down to test days lows. Must not have been too impressed with said data,. Could be another down week ladies and gentlemen.
At 47, it's only a short distance from here to a stable economic bottom, though. And the data appear to be better than anticipated by the "economists". If this is in fact a hint that we're nearing the floor of the "L" bottom, that would be good for a lot of people.
S&P at $888. can $666 be far behind?
Fewer goods in a shrinking economy but at increasing prices. Didn't somebody invent a word for that?
Green mold mistaken for green shoots. We need more Ben the Dollar HazMat team action! Quick, before someone sneezes!
Deflationistas tend to inflate their cause, for some reason.
"......it's only a short distance from here to a stable economic bottom, though"
.......but it's in the opposite direction!
positioning for the 3rd half recovery.
"If this is in fact a hint that we're nearing the floor of the "L" bottom, that would be good for a lot of people"
We're not quite there yet. Besides ISM is just a monthly Survey I think and it would be better to look at service prices in the CPI to gauge the health of the service sector.
Maybe someone can scrape the green shoots off my windshield....seem to have been lost on the L Shaped Freeway and hit a truckload of them while riding in the unemployed lane.
Stimulus kicking in. Your tax dollars at work.
.....the indictment against Sergey Aleynikov sure is moving forward with the "speed of light". Bound, gagged, and hustled away to a remote location by the FBI and their boss at GS.
Money
Put on your emergency flashers and you might get a check from the gov't. Money walks BS gets a a free gov't ride.
Wouldn't a "floor" of an L bottom be when payrolls stop shrinking and downward pressure on wages slows?
It seems to me that fancy graphs aside, the two things to look for are stabilization in unemployment and the states balancing their budgets. Then we can look for green shoots.
It is going to be a long time.
(the Mrs got thru to Zero Hedge thru the backdoor)
Why is Reuters' Dow chart showing 15-20 minutes behind?
Odd.
http://markets.on.nytimes.com/research/tools/builder/api.asp?sym=%24DJI&duration=1&chartstyle=Home&w=337&h=250&display=fillclose
Filed under doom:
Unemployed Wall Streeters flock to CIA jobs, doing to national security what they did to world finance:
World Economy Becomes Focus For CIA Recruiting : NPR
Listen to the beauty-pageant-contestant answers given by "Alex," especially his second part.
Instead of 007, maybe his codename is (007) or -007 to indicate a loss.
took forever but finally got to new zerohedge.
Jim in Portland
Huh don't know how they found you. Might be your registration papers at Oregon DMV.
Wall*Streeters have got nothing on Jains Bond, secret agent 006.66
ISM: indicating contraction in the non-manufacturing sector for the ninth consecutive month
Here comes Rosemary's Baby.
Tim and Jim,
Either state registration-some states do sell dmv reg lists to dealerships, direct mail co's.
Most likely Jiffy Lube...Vin is picked up by manufacturer. They are then added to uniform list with specified dealer in area getting your data...
Btw- they can do email appends also.....
CR: GM Bankruptcy Plan Approved
Which GM is that?
There are so many nowadays.
Is that the one with the white stripe?
An old Chinese man warned me never to feed the automakers after midnight.
Some Aimee Mann lyrics for the post 4th of July Monday blues.
Fifty years after the fair
the picture I have is so clear
underneath the clouds in the air
rose the Trylon and the Perisphere
and that for me was the finest of scenes
that perfect world across the river in Queens
Fifty years after the fair
I drink from a different cup
but it does no good to compare
'cause nothing ever measures up
I guess just for a second we thought
that all good things would rise to the top
But how beautiful it was - 'tomorrow'
we'll never have a day of sorrow
we got through the '30's, but our belts were tight
we conceived of a future with no hope in sight
we've got decades ahead of us to get it right
I swear - fifty years after the fair
Fifty years after the fair
I live in tomorrow town
even on a wing and a prayer
the future never came around
It hurts to even think of those days
the damage we do
by the hopes that we raise
But how beautiful it was - 'tomorrow'
we'll never have a day of sorrow
we got through the '30's, but our belts were tight
we conceived of a future with no hope in sight
we've got decades ahead of us to get it right
I swear - fifty years after the fair
Open the hood on a 1965 Mustang and everything is easy to get to and work on, and then try the same thing on a 2009 Mustang...
The changes in our financial system are many times more drastic from 1965 to 2009, too complex for anybody to understand.
Florida aided Allen Stanford, suspect in huge swindle
Florida regulators -- over objections by the state's top banking lawyer -- gave sweeping powers to banker Allen Stanford, accused of swindling investors of $7 billion.
IMS is better than worse. So why are we not up 300?
This better than worse nubmer is not even a reason to trade in any direction. The market seems to be all about believing the spin or not.
CR: Gordon Brown Sounds "Second-wake up call for the world economy"
...Or we could hit the snooz button for the 1,000th time.
Basel Too
here come the lawsuits. The victims of Madoff and Stanford will all get their SPIC ponies.
The banks (bottomless money pits) are getting hammered today. Along with Alcoa. Yesterday they tried to spin that the Alcoa numbers wouldn't mean anything. idiots.
I don't why but I picture Gordon Brown blowing on a rams horn and strange vaults opening in answer to his call.
Bernanke explained that countries which dumped the gold standard for fiat inflation recovered from the Great Depression sooner.
Since we do not have a gold standard, we probably are not even in a recession.
That is the magic of fiat, according to Bernanke.
Lesson learned from Madoff/Stanford
If your are in a investment and the returns make you think it may be a ponzi scheme make sure it is a huge ponzi scheme. And talk well in front of a camera.
The magic of Fiat is the cinquecento. It will single handedly save Chrysler.
hehehe.
Some might say that Brown is strangling the UK economy...
YouTube - The Stranglers - Golden Brown
What ended the Great Depression was the 80-90% decline in asset values and increased gov't oversight.
GS Code swipe comments from other sites...
The real problem could be that the GS code will make plain how GS has been able to game the other program traders. Remember, this isn't just front running their own clients, although that may be present, the GS prop trading has been able to play the other high frequency sharks like a quartet of fiddles. However has the code cannot only work out what buttons to push to get GS to jump, (in an automated fashion), but they can now also replicate what GS was doing to other proggies as well.
This has got to be turning some IT manager's hair white, being in supposed control of a system that can/will be billions in an instant in response to a set of triggers you thought would be meaningful, but now could just be arranged with the intent of getting you to commit billions...
this GS code theft could make things interesting in short term....
You could say that GS has used their cloaking device to maximum benefit, but what happens if the device no longer functions?
....so much for "due process" when GS is involved.
The reason the Dow isn't up 300 is because it is summer. The junior traders are on a short leash while the heavy hitters are diving the Maldives from the fantail of their ship "TARP on You II." These newbies are too low on the totem pole to be privy to the "Down is the New Up" memo. We'll just grind through the next 7 weeks and then tanned and rested the Hampton crowd will step back in and show these kids how it is done.
not one cent: Here comes Rosemary's Baby
LOL
not one cent: An old Chinese man warned me never to feed the automakers after midnight
I think that was amc
credit-
I thought about that too....why would they even let this see the light of day unless they already had an alternative?....
It's too bad that most people seem to ask only if GS profit will be affected instead of what that code has done to the markets. BTW is it not odd that volumes have crashed...
Ciao
MS
"New growth always starts under the soil. If you tend the garden, it will grow."
Ben "Chauncey" Bernanke.
Biden: The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy.
Biden must not get out much...probably afraid of swine flu.
Biden: The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there.
Biden seems to believe that it is better to be disastrously wrong in the majority than right in the minority.
Biden: Look, what we have to do now is we have to properly, adequately, transparently and effectively spend out the $787 billion.
Besides the unlikelihood of that, is he referring to the $787B plan based on the misreading of the economy?
The junior traders are on a short leash while the heavy hitters are diving the Maldives from the fantail of their ship "TARP on You II."
Where are the pirates when you need them? Ruthless pirates. Take-no-prisoners pirates.
that russian presidente looks like a dwarf. Is he?
The "GS code swipe" thing is a nothingburger.
Read the affidavit. The guy encrypted the files, uploaded them to some file-sharing site in Germany, and then downloaded them to his home machine. In other words, he encrypted them for himself. He was attempting to steal them, not transfer them to somebody overseas.
The code is almost certainly still sitting on his home computer having gone nowhere.
Revolutionary echo chamber...
YouTube - Stranglers - Shah Shah a go go
nemo-or so they say! He downloaded the trades.....If he got in, he could have pushed those files to multiple places....
nemo-or so they say! He downloaded the trades....
Code != trades.
It's code he helped write.
I hate GS as much as the next guy, but most of the "reporting" on this story is just stupid. It is very clear from the affidavit what happened. The guy was changing jobs and decided to take some of his work with him. He encrypted it, uploaded it from work, and downloaded it again from home. He confessed to all of this when confronted, waiving his Miranda rights, claiming he was only trying to take "open source" code. That last part is a lie, but the rest rings true; he was trying to steal the code, not give it away (duh).
Nemo - you got it. This guy was a petty crook... no conspiracy at all.
Trying to outsmart the biggest crooks of all is not a good idea.
Is this a good indication of why we call these folks "the best and the brightest" ?
As complex as our financial capabilities are, what would happen if one determined individual threw a technological spanner into the works?
If you look at the thing at face value sure it's "nothingburger" but it does point out...in a large way.... just how *ucked our supposedly free market has become.
GS trying to get sympathy for using this guy as a scapegoat for a lack of security (and risk management) gee where have we heard this before!!!
What's even more funny is that the code in question was supposedly the "real deal" and this guy was paid $400k a year? That's what makes the surface story the nothing burger. Using it to bloat the market for it's own gain is the story. Too bad most don't see the connection(s).
Ciao
MS
Rogue traitor
He was just a software engineer. Don't be confused by the "Vice President" title or his pathetic attempts to inflate his resume.
I had a friend who got a job straight out of college as a "Vice President" at Merrill Lynch. That title just means you make more than $150k or something, which on Wall Street is pretty much everybody.
That GS engages in high-frequency automated trading is not exactly a secret.
"New growth always starts under the soil. If you tend the garden, it will grow."
Ben "Chauncey" Bernanke.
.....and if you PISS on the shoots... they will die. Piss on Bernanke.....
He also did a very pathetic job of trying to cover his tracks. If you try to remove a .bash_history file and do not understand what you are doing, it comes back on its own. Guy was incompetent.
Sigh. I could be making so much more money if I simply sold my soul to the devil.
‘I don’t need to hire anybody new. I need to work my existing workers more.’
CR: That seems to make sense, but I wondered if it has been true in previous recessions (that a large number of part time workers - for economic reasons - became fully employed before the unemployment rate started to decline)....Looking back at previous recessions, it doesn't appear that there was a decline in part time workers (for economic reasons) prior to a decline in the unemployment rate.
People can work more hours without changing part- or full-time status.
"Full-time" can stretch from about 30-80 hours per week.
"Part-timers" have worked over 40 hours in the real world.
Nemo, the WSJ article said he made $400K per year.
His salary at the time of his resignation was about $400,000 a year.
Is that what WS programmers get paid? Maybe this old dog can learn some new coding tricks!
best wishes
Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.
John Muir
Do yourselves all a favor, and get away from this ball & chain cleverly disguised as a computer, and go seek honesty in the wilderness...
Yes... Nemo.. go on
Nemo - I am "CEO" and still code.
Independent Consultant.
Yup. This kid got way over his head.
One question regarding High Frequency Trading: Who is GS trading with at those speeds? There needs to always be another sucker...
Not One Cent, the "part time" is what people say in a survey - those numbers are from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and isn't related to how the company classifies them. So if people are working 45 hours a week - and call that "part time for economic reasons" - I guess they'd still be considered part time
best wishes
CalculatedRisk --
Is that what WS programmers get paid?
If you are moderately senior and working on the guts of GS's high-frequency trading platform?
Sure, why not...
"Who is GS trading with at those speeds?"
Whoever is unlucky enough to be on the other side of the transaction. There's an interesting paper at Zero Hedge that explains it. Just because GS is at high speed doesn't mean the counterparty is; in fact, it's better for GS if the other party is a regular algorithm trader.
another overheard theory: GS is using this story to its advantage by bignewsing this nobody and using it as cover for a market reversal which they are front-running.
Although I would describe him as a "systems engineer" rather than "programmer". You don't get "microsecond latency" from Visual Basic. (Or from Windows, for that matter.)
But on a Linux machine, with a thorough understanding of how the internals work, it is not that hard. If you know enough to write a Linux device driver, then you know enough to do this guy's job.
lot of non-manufacturing employment recently spraying green ink and green paint on brown shoots
Who is GS trading with at those speeds?
Actually, there's a high-frequency trader about 10 minutes from my parents' house.
Automated Trading Desk. (http://www.atdesk.com). bought by the C in 2007 for about $700M.
Some businesses have a sticky caste system (social identity) with different benefits (health, etc.) for full- and part-time but hours worked can be elastic.
Speaking of automated trading, it seems a little strange to me that there's even a 'trading floor' these days.
Just because GS is at high speed doesn't mean the counterparty is
Exactly. Counterparty could be grandma with her limit order that she put in months ago.
The exchanges are all electronic. Even I can place orders from my home machine and have them filled in less than 100 milliseconds. (Never mind why I know that.)
Goldman and others co-locate their servers in the same physical building as the exchange, so their latencies are less than 1 millisecond. NYSE has to keep beefing up their own capacity in order to keep these traders from going somewhere faster.
NateTG (profile) wrote on Mon, 7/6/2009 - 10:52 am
Speaking of automated trading, it seems a little strange to me that there's even a 'trading floor' these days.
One for the money - two for the public show.
Nemo,
Thanks as always for sharing your thoughts.
I just have one question (I hope) for you and others who are following this story.
Why was this guy arrested by the Feds on criminal charges when UBS (alleging something similar for three of their quants who went to Jeffries earlier this year) had to file a civil case for damages?
Sorry, I can't find a better link to the story, but it does include the affidavit in the UBS case.
UBS Accuses Three Quant Traders Of Stealing Its Secret Code
I'm not a fan of either ZH or Denninger, nor terribly paranoid about GS, but the case seems either absurdly overcharged or underreported as to what he did.
nor terribly paranoid about GS
This would be why the incident doesn't make sense to you.
AnonyMiss --
I don't know. UBS is a Swiss company, right? So maybe the FBI does not have jurisdiction?
The affidavit makes a big deal about the guy uploading to a site in Germany, or being in New Jersey when he connected to the machines in New York, etc... It is possible that to get the FBI involved the "crime" had to cross state and/or national lines.
It does not look to me like they moved particularly quickly. The crime happened at the start of June and it was almost a month before he got arrested. That sounds about right to contact the FBI, get them to ask questions, and so on.
Although I would not rule out preferential treatment. Law enforcement always seems to move faster when the victim is wealthy.
Homer Economicus article:
Treasury: We propose that the regulator be authorized to define standards for “plain vanilla”
If we the public are so stupid, can we have a plain vanilla tax code as a proof of concept before you meddle more in banking?
How can they propose these rules with a straight face?
Sorry, I should have stated "anyone who is rationally following this story and attempting an impartial interpretation of the known "facts" in the case."
My bad.
The real issue behind this story is how much of the volume on the exchanges is just a bunch of computers trading massive volumes to capture fractions of pennies per trade. Zerohedge had a story up last night that stated that 48.6% of the entire volume on the NYSE last week was program trading. A new record since the exchange has been tracking the data.
Buy and hold. For how many nanoseconds?
We thought SkyNet had its incubation in the military nets, but apparently it was really born in the data centers at the exchanges.
Can't get through to ZH right now, GS's jammers must be at full power.
ZH coming up fine here. GS must own your ISP.
ZH coming up fine here. GS must own your ISP.
Well, the blogspot one is. zerohedge.com, not so much.
that russian presidente looks like a dwarf. Is he?
-we prefer the term "vertically challanged".
Zed's debt baby, no ZH here either.
Not one cent-
Nice segue, and a valid one.
Thanks Nemo.
It also made a really big deal out of him being a "Russian immigrant" even though he was educated in the US and appears to have lived and worked here his entire adult life. I read some of his posts/commentary on various forums (google both Serge and Sergey), looked at his linked in profile and even watched his two YouTube videos.
Having looked through his publically available record, your explanation of him being in over his head makes more sense than the Russian spy spin. Still, you have to wonder why GS would make such a BFD over something a pretty low level employee did. (Having said that, I would love to make $400k/year, but it seems pretty far down the GS pecking order).
400k at GS = drone
It's open season on scapegoats, and there is no limit.
Good morning, doomers! Hope everybody had a great July 4th! Here's a weird little stat for you, the Associated Press "economic stress" index, which is evidently getting worse:
AP analysis: Economic stress up in much of nation | Oregon Local News - OregonLive.com
It's open season on scapegoats, and there is no limit.
And Boss pays a bounty.
We will not monetize the debt, Part VIXXX
Federal Reserve Bank of New York - Permanent Open Market Operations
Operation Date: 07/06/2009
Operation Type: Outright Coupon Purchase
Release Time: 10:15 AM
Close Time: 11:00 AM
Settlement Date: 07/07/2009
Maturity/Call Date Range: 12/31/2013 - 04/30/2016
Total Par Amt Accepted (mlns) : $7,000
Total Par Amt Submitted (mlns) : $18,151
@ghostfaced...yow...that's wild
"He encrypted it, uploaded it from work, and downloaded it again from home."
So he RARed the file and stuck it up on rapidshare.com?
It may be contained then, if RS automatically deletes the file. The fact it's encrypted is a nothing burger, and there is no end to the number of people who would be interested in this file and willing to commit serious horsepower to cracking it. I'm just curious if someone somewhere cross-loaded the RS file to another filestorage system somewhere.
With consumer deleveraging and credit crunch - we cannot have any quick recovery - L is best case scenario. Speculative stock buying and PPT euphoria is no substitute for anything.
Credit is falling so much - private credit decreased by $1.8 Trillion is the first quarter, consumer credit by $90.7 billion (annualized). Household net worth down by $13.87 trillion.
There is no trigger for recovery - new technology, new markets, demographics, new ideas. Green is just a boondoggle and BRICs can only do so much. JPM and GS etc are just trying to create another bubble - it suits their ends not yours.
hat tip to Blogger: Blog not found
The ISM index 9and all these reports announced almost every day) increase market volatility and make it very hard for active investors to actually make money.
In my opinion, it is all a matter of market timing. It does not matter if it is gold, oil, or Microsoft, if you have access to good market timing signals, they will help you get in and out at a profit.
No guarantees in this business, but if they are right most of the time, you can still make $s.
There are may web sites providing them out there (search Google). Just find one that works and use it! Check out Invetrics - Financial insights and stock market timing signals for the active investor
as an example.
Its Dow Jones timing signals are up 49% as of 7/5/09 while the Dow is up just 25% off its March lows.
Following a market timing system works!