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Re:Court Overturns Conviction of Ex-Goldman Programmer by gaius on Friday February 17, 2012 @03:38PM (#3604880)
I'm not sure why you would, without Goldman's entire infrastructure (SecDB, Slang, etc) it probably wouldn't be that useful. The only thing you could "steal" is what's between your ears anyway.
Re:Court Overturns Conviction of Ex-Goldman Programmer by metageek on Friday February 17, 2012 @05:17PM (#3605202)
You'd probably have to write new code; but you could port the algorithms, which are the distillation of their trading expertise. That'd boost you several years ahead in domain knowledge—and, as GS pointed out, you'd also know how GS was going to trade, which would help you predict market movements.

I suspect the latter wouldn't actually be all that accurate, though, since all those split-second decisions are going to be highly dependent on how fast everything runs, which means your GS emulator can't make the same decisions unless you port everything exactly.

Re:Court Overturns Conviction of Ex-Goldman Programmer by gaius on Friday February 17, 2012 @05:34PM (#3605244)
You would also need to replicate the portfolio the algorithm was managing...