Goldman Sachs Trading Training Manual
by Sarah Butcher 18 November 2020
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Aug 27, 2020 Chavez joined J. Aron, Goldman’s then commodities and energy brokerage unit, as a ‘strat’ on its oil trading desk in 1993. He has said previously that he was the only openly gay man working at Goldman Sachs in New York, starting out on “the most macho of all macho corners of Wall Street” and says he developed tactics to cope. A Goldman Sachs Group Inc investment banker was released on bond and placed on leave by the firm after allegedly being involved in an insider trading scheme, a bank spokeswoman said on.
Goldman Sachs partner is the sort of job title that speaks for itself. Once you've made partner, you're at the top of the tree. However, some Goldman partners are more impactful than others - and they're not necessarily the partners in the front office.
If there were an award for Goldman Sachs partner of the year in 2020 (there isn't) it might go to Orla Dunne, the little known head of 'Foundational Infrastructure' at the firm. London-based Dunne was only made partner last week, but has been instrumental in Goldman's ability to survive and thrive during the pandemic.
Speaking at the Women in Technology online festival today, Dunne outlined the scope of her job. 'I run the technology in our data centres, our buildings, for our voice networks and multimedia infrastructure,' said Dunne. She is all about the technology infrastructure that lets Goldman and its people function.
This has been a huge year for Dunne and her team. It was Dunne who, according to Business Insider, was one of the first at the firm to apprehend the dangers of the pandemic. In late February, when the world was still trying to process the implications of the virus, Dunne reportedly sent an email suggesting that the firm should start thinking about where it could find equipment for staff if a 'shelter in place' lockdown were imposed. Preparations were initiated.
Speaking today from a simple room somewhere in her home country of Ireland, Dunne recalled the significance of that period, describing it as a time of 'very interesting challenges' as 98% of Goldman's staff moved to working from home. Goldman already had virtual desktops, said Dunne, but it was necessary to rapidly add 'bespoke solutions to make internet and audio bridges the primary focus instead of buildings.' This unfolded at a time of 'unprecedented volatility' in the markets and coincided with 'peak volumes in market data update rates', with peak trading volumes and transactions. It also coincided with a pre-planned accelerated data centre migration in Hong Kong.
Goldman navigated the chaos. Net earnings in the markets division were up 63% year-on-year in the first nine months (before the 1MDB fine). Dunne had been a managing director at Goldman for 11 years before she was made partner last week, and her promotion surely had something to do with her quick thinking and competence in this COVID year.
Speaking today, Dunne said technologists at Goldman 'enable the business.' 'We partner with them from the moment we see an opportunity,' she said. Their role is about designing and executing a solution and then seeing it delivered. Technologists are not second class corporate citizens.
Dunne worked for Morgan Stanley and UBS before joining Goldman in 2000 as a vice president (VP) in the technology division. Today, she cautioned against presuming your career will progress in a graceful upwards arc, recommended embracing change and focusing on what you can rather than can't control. She advocated listening. 'You have two ears and one mouth and you should use them in that proportion,' said Dunne, noting too that, 'You are often judged more how you react to bad news than good news.'
If you want to get ahead in technology - or anywhere in banking, then Dunne advised against becoming the sort of irreplaceable subject matter expert that prevents you escaping from a silo; always be training your replacement. Go easy on yourself: 'When I reflect back on my early career, the person who put pressure on me was me,' said Dunne; 'I thought I had to be twice as good to be half as good.'
Dunne also had some advice for all the people in London who are about to be transplanted to Europe because of Brexit. Early in her career, she was asked to move to Paris to build a new data and telecoms network. When she arrived at Gard du Nord she was struck with panic: 'I didn't speak the language, I didn't know anyone in Paris, I wasn't ready for life on a trading desk.' It worked out: sometimes uncomfortable situations are an opportunity to evolve.
Lastly, Dunne said you need something beyond your career to thrive: you need a hobby. 'Find something you love,' she advised.
And then the camera turned off, and Dunne disappeared into her 1950s work-from-home backdrop in Ireland, a location made possible by the work of she and her team. Goldman bankers in home offices globally have Dunne to thank.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.by Sarah Butcher 30 November 2020
Jon Butler knows a thing or two about technology in investment banks. A former managing director at Goldman Sachs, Butler spent over 15 years with the firm and ran global cash equities trading technology before he left in 2016. Today he runs fintech firm Velox with Jason Yan, a former Goldman technology fellow, and has a long term perspective on banks' struggle to hire the world's best technologists. - It wasn't always like this.
“While I worked in banking, banks’ ability to hire technology talent changed completely,' says Butler, describing the evolution as, 'like night and day.' When he began working in banking technology at Goldman in 2001, Butler says the firm had its pick of talent. 'We’d go to the top five engineering schools in the U.S. and take out the best people. At that time, if you were a technologist at an Ivy League School the pinnacle of your aspirations was to work for an investment bank.'
The historic quality of banks' technologists was reflected in the quality of the products they developed. Morgan Stanley famously used to employ Arthur Whitney, the Canadian computer scientist who developed the coding language A+ and who co-founded Kx Systems, the data analysis company now owned by First Derivatives, which runs the Kdb databases. Goldman Sachs developed risk and pricing database SecDB in the 1990s, along with its own coding language, Slang, a kind of precursor to Python.
When it was invented, SecDB was a groundbreaking achievement, says Butler. - “SecDB is probably one of the best technological achievements on Wall Street. At the time it was designed it was incredibly futuristic and forward-looking. In the OTC derivatives space it made it very, very quick for quants to build new products and models.”
However, Butler says banks' ability to build contemporary platforms as ingenious as SecDB is compromised by their hiring issues. - Whereas it used to be possible for banks to recruit the world's best technologists, they now have heavy competition from deep-pocketed FAANG technology companies and others. Nor does it help that legacy systems can make banking technology jobs comparatively unappealing and talent retention problematic. 'For a new graduate the tech work can seem a lot less glamorous,' says Butler - particularly when their friends are working on shiny new systems in Silicon Valley.
The platform Butler's developed at Velox is intended to offer a workaround to banks' technology talent issues. He describes it as a kind of SecDB, but for the flow trading space. 'SecDB works very well for low volume products with high complexity, where risk management and pricing is very analytical. Velox-based solutions tackle the core problems of flow tradin - being able to attract and manage very large volumes of electronic client order flow as profitably as possible,” says Butler.
The Velox system is effectively a full stack flow trading solution that allows banks to, 'innovate rapidly on top of their existing market infrastructure,' says Butler. It deskills the process. “A system like Velox enables developers of all levels of experience to contribute on trading systems. This reduces the training time needed for new hires but importantly allows the new generation of tech-savvy traders to be able to contribute directly themselves.” In this sense, Butler says Velox is similar to the low code tools which democratize coding.
Goldman Sachs Trading Training Manuals
As banks buy-in systems like Velox, Butler says their need to recruit the world's best technology talent will diminish. Twenty years ago, he says front office developers would be writing their own memory utilities in C++. Not any more. 'That’s now done for you. It’s like moving from assembling electrons and neutrons to create an atom, to building at a higher level with larger molecules and then structures.
'Velox creates a further set of Java abstractions that represent the fundamental building blocks of all real-time trading systems. Out clients wire together theses abstractions to create new products,' Butler says.
Velox is coded in Java, which Butler says makes sense because of the need to reduce latency. The Velox system is already built, but Butler says Velox is still interested in hiring excellent Java developers of its own. 'We have offices in the U.K., N.Y. and Shanghai and have always worked 80% remotely. We’re interested in hiring talented Java developers, and the great thing about COVID is that we can now leverage people based anywhere.”
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
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