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'Code theft trader' denied bail

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The man accused of stealing proprietary computer code from Societe General was refused bail last week because the court feared he was a flight risk.

Samarth Agrawal was a trader at Societe General. He was caught allegedly copying code which ran the bank's high-frequency trading systems.

26-year-old Agrawal was arrested on Monday. FBI officials found code printouts at his apartment, Reuters reports.

He has been charged with theft of trade secrets and could face up to five years in prison if convicted.

Agrawal was due to start work at another firm on Monday but was arrested before he could start. ®

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Compiled code?

I believe you may be overestimating the banking system. You assume that an entire bank's trading enterprise is being run on some big swish bespoke application (written in C# or Java, no doubt). But it's equally likely to be based around a bandy set of glorified Excel Spreadsheet Macros, tied together with some VBA forms, that, it appears, aren't even locked down with a proper password.

The recent evidence concerning the aptitude of banks, rather argues that the "bandy bunch of VBA macros", is the more likely of the two scenarios. This is the same bank that employed Jérôme Kerviel, remember.

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¿you can not be serious?

> Well done AC and Daniel 1 for commenting on something about which you clearly don't have a clue. A high frequency trader is most likely someone who is both a statistician and a coder ..

Where does it say he wrote some of the code and what coder in his right mind copies the source into a Word doc and prints it out ????

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Ah but you forgot Java...

Yes, you can write low latency trading apps and strategies in Java. ;-)

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