Ken Griffin Not Willing To Share His Secrets Even To Punish Those Who (Allegedly) Stole Them
Everyone knows Ken Griffin is a bit prickly about unauthorized people laying eyes on his precious, lucrative algorithms and high-frequency trading code. GSA Capital Partners certainly knows this, either because it allegedly went out of its way to get its eyes on those secrets without Griffin and, according to Citadel Securities, shame-facedly shredded its copies thereof at Citadel’s insistence, or at the latest when Griffin sued it for allegedly doing so.
Thing is, the only way Griffin was going to get legal satisfaction over the matter would have been to let other people—judges and lawyers, specifically—see the secrets he works so hard to keep secret so as to allow them to determine just how secret the secrets were, because GSA rather irritatingly insisted that there wasn’t really anything very secret about the things it had seen, regardless of how secret it aimed to keep the fact that it was trying to see them, and anyway it wasn’t trying to launch a high-frequency trading strategy anyway, in spite of requesting a trading plan from a high-frequency trader. And so, unusually, to preserve whatever secrecy was left, and unusually in a legal battle over his beloved secrets, Griffin has apparently decided, in this one instance, that discretion is the better part of valor.
Ken Griffin’s market maker and GSA Capital Partners LLP reached a confidential settlement, GSA said in a statement Thursday…. The two firms “recognize and respect the importance and value of the other’s rights over their confidential information and intellectual property,” GSA said.
Citadel Securities didn’t respond to a request for comment. The firm was seeking at least $40 million in damages.
Citadel Securities Settles With Fund Over Secret Algorithm [Bloomberg]
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