Getting Goldman Sachs's view on how much a derivative should cost once required a trading account at the elite Wall Street firm. Soon anyone with a GitHub account will be able to do it.

Goldman later this month plans to release on GitHub, the popular developer-collaboration site, some of the code that its own traders and engineers use to price securities and analyse and manage risk. A few lines of code can spit out an analysis that once would have meant a chain of phone calls, emails and spreadsheets.