[azernik]

That... sounds amateurish. Everyone just uses a hardware RNG for random number seeds.

[darksaints]

It would be amateurish if it were cryptography for sure. But I would never expect that sort of attack vector as a quant. Most quants are worried about alpha loss, not having your order flow fingerprinted.

[ah-]

Well it's nice for testing to have something repeatable. But still sounds like an urban legend.

[simonh]

Nowadays yes but I suspect this story is from decades ago, before hardware RNGs and good cryptographically secure algorithms were commonplace.