Unstructured Finance

Wall Street will have a simulated cyber war called Quantum Dawn 2 this month.

Quantum Dawn 2 is coming to Wall Street.

No, it’s not a video game or a bad zombie movie; it’s a simulated cyber attack to prepare banks, brokerages and exchanges for what has become an ever-bigger risk to their earnings and operations.

Organized by the trade group SIFMA, Quantum Dawn 2  will take place on June 28 – a summer Friday that, with any luck, will be a relatively quiet day in the real markets.The drill involves not just big Wall Street firms like Citigroup and Bank of America, but the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to SIFMA officials.

“We go through a pretty rigorous scenario where we look at multiple threats being thrown out at the U.S. equity markets,” said Karl Schimmeck, vice president of financial services operations at SIFMA.

During the exercise, which runs from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in New York, participants will receive blasts of vague and confusing information about what appears to be a hacker attack on fake trading and information platforms that are not plugged into actual markets. The participants may see “latency,” or unusual slowness, in trading, or viruses trying to invade the systems. They will also have to call one another to figure out what’s going on.

Then the Quantum Dawn drill will pause to allow executives to make decisions: should they slow down trading? Use different routing mechanisms to exchanges to get orders filled but avoid threats? When the process begins again, it will fast forward in “warp speed” to a new situation later in the day where conditions have worsened or changed.

Darwin theorized that peacocks’ colorful plumage was a sign of        their evolutionary strength.

Wall Street has always been known as a cutthroat kind of place, but lately it seems big investment banks are just mulling around, hoping their competitors die first.

A report on Friday by Goldman Sachs bank analysts said that the industry has entered what they called a state of “reverse Darwinism,” in which banks are betting their long-suffering trading operations can increase revenue not by stealing business from rivals on a competitive basis, but by waiting for rivals to call it quits – leaving their clients with no choice but to move business elsewhere.

Not everyone agrees that using high-speed machines to trade stocks in less time than it takes the average person to blink is a bad thing, but the people who do might be heartened by the letter a congressman sent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has waged a decades-long struggle against computerized trading sent the SEC a hint: The power to curb high-frequency trading has been within its grasp all along.

In his letter, Markey described a law he co-sponsored in 1989 to increase the agency’s power to regulate computerized trading, a precursor to HFT that employed computer programs to make trading decisions without the participation of conscious humans. The law lets the SEC “limit practices which result in extraordinary levels of volatility,” according to Markey’s citation.

By Matthew Goldstein

The full year numbers aren’t in, but it appears Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital had a pretty good year–especially compared to most other long/short equity hedge funds which lost money. But how does this year’s 8% gain stack-up against other strong years posted by the Stamford, Conn. hedge fund?

As we reported previously on UF, a good chunk of SAC Capital’s trading prowess in 2011 is being credited by sources to a single team led by Gabe Plotkin. His $1.2 billion book is one of the largest at SAC Capital and has generated between $150 million and $200 million in profits.

Indeed, only Cohen’s own 2 billion book–called the “big book,” the “Cohen account,” or simply “COHE”–is believed to manage more money at the $14 billion fund.