At about 1:30 PM EST Wednesday on CNBC, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera and Charlie Gasparino attacked ZeroHedge, a blogger whose been pestering Gasparino about possible favoritism, for not covering the "quant flushing" story.

Their disrespect towards the blogging community showed just how politicized CNBC is, and how deferential to Goldman Sachs the financial media is.

For more see my upcoming post.

Simple gamers tools re: faster rig, bigger pipe and closer to the server. If MS of time deside the kill (if both players hit the trigger at the same time online in real time), the kill goes to the one with the best setup.

Yes I know about time stamps, but I would have to test its reponse times from various locations at differant times and loads before signing off on that issue.

Skippy…Quants and their ilk love too game eh.

Could this code be used to give trading flows physical dimensions, then view it in no clip mode and almost in real time. Seems everyone today wants 3D rendering of their work environment.

Any way it wasn't off the rack tracking/trading gear, so what the hell was/is it. Are MS compression waves and speed of trading exploits to be had, does SG have a nice C++ macro bind, lol play in G mode.

Skippy…Vdus yardguy or seagull must board.

Because they can afford the programmers. Really, it's that simple. If you had a software hook into the nyse trading software, you could write one too and you can run it on a plain Dell Dimension too. Can you perform tenths-second trades? No. Any firm with close physical proximity to the trading platform could though. (network latency and message passing timeouts would kill you otherwise.)

Programmed trading is not illegal. Even at GS volume.

Peripheral Visionary: GS is sitting on top of a river of information, and the chances that they're using some of that to influence some of their prop desk trading is high.

No, it's not high. I can't describe to you how difficult that is.

Let's say GS defies the odds and they can front-run customer trades, what's the penalty? Really, how bad could it be? They can argue whatever regs are on the books don't apply because "this one is different."

Skippy…beware the gamer.

One has to ask the question, Why did/does GS _have_ such code? Now, we know that the US Guvmint has had superduper Friends in High Places to goose the markets for them. Yes, the options guywire is one way. But one might suppose that GS 'got the OK' to 'monitor trading flows;' y'know, to 'anticipate problems.' And one must not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain, what? Personally, I suspect that the Guvmint has long known that GS had such a capability. I'm not surprised that the FBIs would be on this quick regardless, for the IT security angle mentioned in comments above, but if GS called to say, "Our Guvmint hotwire is compromised," well I only wonder that Aleynikov is still alive. Maybe they'd kinda like to know who he was shopping it to.

But the real issue isn't 'the Aleynikove Code.' It isn't even 'GS Huffer' access. It's WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY *DOING* WITH THAT INFO. O'course the Guvmint has, and will, totally looked the other way on *that*.

Somebeody flick a match while the fumes are still concentrated, and let's see if this we can get a backdraft up Goldman's private money pipe.

"This is a sea change that is necessary because our elected representatives are reluctant to deviate from the status quo."

There is some truth in that statement, but
reluctance, which implies, among other emotions, fear, is not the problem, incompetence and corruption are the problem. Put another way, where there doesn't exist a fundamental lack of understanding about financial and economic matters mitigating reform, there is bribery, legalized or not

Edward Harrison also said:

"Barring financial Armageddon, we will not see any significant changes. That means we need to push for that change – o it's not going to happen."

The logic here seems sound, but I believe it misses point. The fact that the "authorities" have not enacted genuine reform all but guarantees that the outcome will be catastrophic. In any case, had "they" taken the bull by the horns the outcome would probably be disastrous anyway because the necessary reforms entail the liquidation of debt of unprecedented size and scope.