Prop Trading

Lately, Goldman has been extolling the virtues of its theological affiliations and humanistic aspirations to, well, high heaven. Curious to dig deeper through the firm's purported philanthropic efforts, we decided to take a detailed look at the 2007 and 2008 tax records of the charitable Goldman Sachs Foundation. We will not comment on the performance of the actual Foundation: to the chagrin of many needy children who look up to the St. Goldman cathedral in anticipation of a generous holiday season, the Goldman Sachs Foundation has lost gobs of money in the past two years: the fund started off with $275 million in 2007, $269 million in 2008 and ended the year with $161 million. Of course, it is Goldman's prerogative to trade with its money as it desires: while this loss is deplorable, its only outcome will be that fewer Cap 'N' Trade propaganda initiatives will get the due "charitable funding" courtesy of Goldman. Yet what the foundation's tax record do provide, is a very unique and open glimpse in the myriad trading patterns of Goldman's proprietary trading operations... And boy does the firm trade.

We are working a buy order for a customer of ours (it is not in the large cap top 100 names where HFT blesses us with their liquidity), and trying to float our bid in as the market is heavy. Essentially, we are bobbing and weaving, changing our trading venues, and pegging at times off the bid side of the NBBO. Some predatory proprietary algorithm keeps trying to join us on the bid on the ISE, so as to stop our pegged bid from further floating down, so that they can short our stock at inflated prices in our destination (without hitting the stock in the ISE).