How To Be a Rogue Trader: A Penguin Special from Portfolio [Kindle Edition]

John Gapper (Author)

Book Description

Nick Leeson at Barings, Jerome Kerviel at Societe Generale, John Rusnak at Allied Irish Banks. And now the 31 year-old Kweku Adoboli, who allegedly ran up $2.3bn in losses at UBS. These are the rogue traders who have bought banks to their knees and global financial systems to a halt. In this short ebook, The Financial Times columnist John Gapper unlocks the mystery by delving into the  risk-taking instincts of both humans and animals - from yellow-eyed junco sparrows in Arizona to honey-bees. A rogue trader is often an outsider who starts in a lowly role and gambles with a bank's money in a bid to become a star. Gapper traces patterns of behavior and personality that could be used to catch them before disaster strikes. But do the banks really want to? And are they just the symptoms of a financial system gone rogue?

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Listen up! I have just finished reading the brilliant, fast-paced How To Be A Rogue Trader . . . and hereby recommend it as required reading by the CEOs, risk officers, derivatives traders, boards of directors, accountants and analysts of every publicly held financial institution here or abroad." -- Robert Lenzner, Forbes

"How To Be a Rogue Trader is really good . . . [Gapper] looks at the common pathologies, and finds quite a few. The first is a trait common not only to rogue traders, but rather to all animals -- it's been seen in birds quite vividly. It's the entirely rational decision which you see in any movie where somebody utters the line 'it's the only chance we've got' -- no matter how improbable your chances of success, if the alternative is failure, then you take the gamble." -- Felix Salmon, Reuters

"Timely, pithy and insightful . . . should be must-reading for every senior Wall Street executive as well as every Occupy Wall Street protester who wants to understand the game that's really afoot in the offices he pickets." -- Suzanne McGee, The Fiscal Times

Product Details

• File Size: 160 KB
• Print Length: 44 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio (December 1, 2011)
• Sold by: Penguin Publishing
• Language: English
• ASIN: B006CUFYTO
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #357,955 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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