Friday, January 25, 2008

Return of the Lone Trader

Things ain't what they used to be for Lone Gunmen

The political murder business is now a lot more competitive than back in the '60s

Suicide bombers deliver more dramatic, television-friendly results and, more importantly, there's no need to find another Lone Gunman to shoot the first Lone Gunman

...and then another Lone Gunman to shoot the second Lone Gunman

etc etc

Fortunately, there are still plenty of opportunities for the young lone nut about town in the dynamic and exciting world of derivatives trading...





edit:

Hmmm, hang on a minute! No! It couldn't be... ?!





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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Slightly off topic - I was always intrigued by this photograph, found in the Dallas police archives in the early 90s - http://www.pimall.com/nais/news/images/Ghost.gif

Anonymous said...

SG stock prices seem to be OK...

http://tinyurl.com/2vxpj6

BZ

Stef said...

@anon - LOL

@BZ - maybe some lone trader is taking a long position on SG ;)

Anonymous said...

I was thinking "what has Tom Blahblah Cruise to do with this?"...

ziz said...

A €5 Bn. loss is enormous. Probbly requires the thick end of a €30/40 Bn position.

This guy wasn't a star on th edealing desk ...but managed to frig the books to this tune ... for a period of many months because he was a ...star in the back office.

But wait ... SocGen, (who say they invented equity derivatives) announce the sole traders €5 Bn hit simultaneosuly with a write off of duff underwater mortagages of €2.05 Bn. So that's a total €7.5 Bn.write off They had intended to announce SocGen planned to announce €5.5b as profits.which give or take a few hundren million €'s a nett loss of €2 Bn.

And the FT tells us that SocGen will raise €5.5bn through an emergency rights issue, underwritten by J P Morgan and Morgan Stanley, that will leave its Tier One capital ratio higher than before at 8 per cent. The price of the issue will be formally set after SocGen reports its results for 2007 next month.

So they are raising a spare €3.5 Bn (give or take the odd sov.) - which is an expensive exercise, raising Teir One for capital cover HIGHER.

Lord Patel is prepared to bet his large cache of Jeremy Paxman's used underwear that the loan arranger Jerome Kerviel's antics will not get listened to in any court of law either side of La Manche. (Even his much smaller stash of Kirsty Young's freshly laundered - if the odds are good enough).

Stef said...

Have I ever mentioned that I used to do internal audit work for banks/ trading companies?

and I can smell the bullshit from 500 miles away