Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable Software

Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by mschaef on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @11:58AM (#12444432)

I'm pretty sure they're referring to SecDB. There isn't much known about SecDB outside of Goldman, but I think the essence is that it:

1. Is a distributed data store for market positions, etc. 2. There's a dataflow/spreadsheet-like valuation engine on top of the data store 3. It's had long-term and senior level support among management, and most/all of GS's positions and businesses are available within SecDB. 4. There's a large pool of internal talent that's well acquainted with SecDB and how to use it.

So... it gives GS an easy way to see where they are, and then run models to figure out where they might be under different hypothetical scenarios.

What's noteworthy about this to me is that while they may be 'giving away' points 1 and 2 from my list, points 3 and 4 are the bigger competitive differentiators for Goldman. Even if another bank immediately adopts SecDB, while they may get the technology, it'll take them quite a while to integrate it as fully into their culture and business. SecDB implemented for a small bit of a big bank and run by a bunch of relative newcomers is a very different thing than SecDB as it might be implemented at Goldman.

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by rdtsc on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @03:23PM (#12446424)

> There isn't much known about SecDB outside of Goldman

Erm... https://github.com/saleyn/secdb

Written in Erlang with a C driver for low level stuff.

Author is Serge Aleynikov. Ex-GS employee sued in multiple courts over many years by GS.

But yeah, not "officially known" as in they released, but there is probably some association there. Just a guess ;-)

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by mschaef on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @03:55PM (#12446900)

I'm pretty sure that's not the same SecDB. It's interesting that it's written by Serge Aleynikov, but it doesn't really match the extant descriptions of the Goldman tool and it's a fork of https://github.com/maxlapshin/stockdb

(BTW, Nice username.)

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by rdtsc on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @04:49PM (#12447534)

It obviously wasn't the SecDB just an interesting "coincidence". Who knows if there is any relationship or similarity between functionalities there.

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by mschaef on Thursday September 08, 2016 @08:19AM (#12452276)

It makes me wonder if the name is a tribute to the official SecDB. Or... given the history, some kind of slight.

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by rdtsc on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:49PM (#12458118)

Good point. It might be a slight. I doubt the name is a complete coincidence given what he had to go through.

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by fnord123 on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @02:19PM (#12445709)

It's been available outside Goldman for a long time. Cantab Capital had based their systems on it as long ago as 2006. The founders were ex Goldman and wangled some kind of deal where they could use the GS systems.

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Re:Goldman Sachs Has Started Giving Away Its Most Valuable S... by jamessb on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @02:56PM (#12446026)

IIRC from a conversation with an employee, the two were initially very close: I think the deal included something like CC co-locating servers in a GS datacenter as well as licensing its software, but both ended several years ago in anticipation of a change in regulation.

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