King of Goldman’s ‘Straders’ to Leave Firm
Adam Korn supervised 5,000 engineers working to electronify Goldman trading floor
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s GS 0.53% “straders,” the hybrid trader-coder whose star has been on the rise inside the Wall Street firm, are losing their ringleader.
Adam Korn, who represented a new kind of Wall Street trader—one reared on computer code, not instinct—is leaving the firm, people familiar with the matter said Monday. His departure follows that of Martin Chavez, a technologist and trading executive who left at the end of last year. More resignations are expected across the firm in the coming weeks, as 2019 bonuses are paid out.
An 18-year Goldman veteran, Mr. Korn most recently supervised 5,000 engineers working to electronify the trading floor and build new software for clients. The most ambitious, called Marquee, is laying digital pipelines to replace a trading flow that still relies on phone calls and paper tickets.
Goldman has long prided itself on its engineering chops. Its house-built trading and risk-management software, known as SecDB, led a digital revolution on Wall Street in the 1990s, and today about one-quarter of its employees are coders.
But more recently, Chief Executive David Solomon has hired from Silicon Valley and promoted investment bankers into senior tech roles, pulling from traders’ rival tribe. Last fall he hired a pair of outsiders, Amazon.com Inc. veteran Marco Argenti and former Yahoo executive Atte Lahtiranta, to help lead Goldman’s technology efforts.
That has appeared to leave less room for executives like Mr. Korn, an applied math and economics double-major at Brown University who joined Goldman in 2002. He spent his early years churning out code in the corner of the firm’s stock-trading floor and later became Goldman’s first “strader,” a hybrid role that combined risk-taking trader and tech whiz.
He helped lead the development of Marquee, which allows clients to trade, manage risk and access Goldman’s data and research without picking up the phone.
Mr. Korn will remain an adviser to Marquee and will work with Goldman executives evaluating and investing in financial-technology companies, people familiar with the matter said.