SAC was a hedge fund, he explained to the confused Goldman employees, some of whom had never heard of the company. They don’t just buy blocks of IBM to hold for months at a time while playing golf and collecting dividends, they trade. And they don’t just trade. They trade hundreds of stocks a day, hundreds of thousands of shares at a time. They were not interested in a company’s long-term health or whether the new products it had under development would enable it to hire more people in five years. SAC was interested in one thing: short-term movements in the stock price that it could exploit
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