Quant Firm’s $1 Billion Code Is Focus of Rare Criminal Case (1)

To Headlands Technologies LLC, “atoms” and “alphas” were its crown jewels, the top-secret building blocks of source code the quantitative trading firm spent more than $1 billion to develop.

And then they were stolen.

That’s the allegation that US prosecutors made in January when they charged former Headlands trader Richard Ho with theft of trade secrets. The 36-year-old Cambridge University computer science graduate, who has pleaded not guilty, faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if convicted.

Ho’s prosecution could have a major impact on Wall Street’s war for quant talent, laying down a marker for when trading algorithms and ...