Goldman Sachs generated about 20.7% of its total revenues from the equities business in its Institutional Client Services segment in fiscal year 2013!!
Goldman’s plan to sell its New York Stock Exchange trading business comes at a time when high frequency trading businesses are under fire from federal bodies
This eerily coincides with the release of Michael Lewis's book about HFT. It seems like the reason why goldman sachs is doing this is because they're increasingly relying more on algorithms and quants to make their trades rather than human traders. This is an interesting and scary development honestly
Yeah, they recently said that they want to disassociate themselves from all that, because they always get attacked the hardest by the govt because they're "the smartest (and richest) guys in the room".