Illustration: 731. Photography: Bloomberg
The Big Take
Quant Firm’s $1 Billion Code Is Focus of Rare Criminal Case
The prosecution of a trader could define how a quant algorithm can become stolen property and have a huge impact on Wall Street’s talent war.
To Headlands Technologies LLC, “atoms” and “alphas” were its crown jewels, the top-secret building blocks of source code the quantitative trading firm spent more than $1 billion to develop.
And then they were stolen.