Читать книгу Rogues of Wall Street - Waxman Andrew - Страница 9

So who exactly is the Rogue Trader, and what is the source of his roguishness? He is not the handsome rogue of your Victorian novel. Though he may be handsome, he probably won't want to attract undue attention to his activities. He is more likely to be the rat creeping around in your sewers, finding a home in the mess and dirt that never gets cleaned up. The profile of the Rogue Trader is fairly consistent: male, early thirties, not the most favored by birth or schooling. He likely has a strong sense of his abilities and is also likely to underestimate those of his better‐educated, more high‐born colleagues. More importantly, he is likely also to underestimate the risks of trading without active supervision. It certainly takes a good deal of self‐confidence to take on all the risks that the Rogue Trader takes on. Much of that self‐confidence is likely fueled by a bull market and a lack of experience and understanding of how markets can suddenly change to the negative. Like many traders, the Rogue Trader will tend to attribute his success to his brilliance rather than the market. Unlike other traders, however, he has no supervisors or colleagues to protect and help him when the market changes, because he does everything in secret.

Generally, the Rogue Trader is not a direct entrant into the bank's trading team but came to it via a role in operations or the back office. Nor does he generally work in the most prestigious or complex areas of trading. More likely, he is part of a team that facilitates fairly routine types of trades for institutional clients. In the stand‐out cases such as Societe Generale, Barings,19 and UBS, the Rogue Trader has been distinguished by his operational knowhow and his aggressive approach. However, such attributes do not necessarily set him obviously apart from his colleagues. Moreover, such aggressiveness is likely to bring plaudits rather than suspicion from his manager. Kweku Adoboli, for example, was reported to have participated in sports betting on the side, and was evidently warned against such activity by compliance. Such activity could potentially have been a red flag. However, for those who have read Liars Poker20 and read about the card‐playing exploits of investment bank executives like James Cayne,21 such activity did not obviously stand out on the trading floor. In fact, it may be that supervisors would have seen this as an indication of the type of aggressive trading activity they were looking for in their young traders.

Indeed, after working for two years as a trading analyst in the bank's back office, Adoboli was promoted to a Delta One trading desk. In 2008, he became a director on the ETF desk, and by 2010, he was promoted to director, with a total annual salary of almost £200,000 (about $254,000). Beginning in 2008, Adoboli started using the bank's money for unauthorized trades. He entered false information into UBS's computers to hide the risky trades he was making. He exceeded the bank's per‐employee daily trading limit of $100 million, and failed to hedge his trades against risk. In mid‐2011, UBS launched an internal investigation into Adoboli's trades. On September 14, 2011, Adoboli wrote an email to his manager admitting to booking false trades. His trades cost the bank $2 billion (£1.3 billion) and wiped off $4.5 billion (£2.7 billion) from its share price. The trading losses he incurred while trading for his bank were the largest unauthorized trading losses in British history.

In other respects, Kweku Adoboli fitted the classic Rogue Trader profile to a tee. Being from Nigeria, he was clearly not from the classic Oxbridge, upper‐class English background favored by English investment banks. For his bachelor's degree, Adoboli went to Nottingham Polytechnic and studied computer science rather than Classics. He joined UBS in an operations role and was later able to cross over to a trading role on the Delta One Desk,22 where he facilitated large client equity trades. He lived in an up‐market part of London and his work financed an expensive lifestyle. He was living the dream. Looking at Adoboli's profile in retrospect, one may wonder why he didn't stand out more from his colleagues. In reality, however, many of Adoboli's colleagues likely shared several aspects of this profile: his age, sex, lifestyle, and the aggressive, hard‐charging trading and work ethic. Slightly more unusual was his educational and work background in operations. However, it is the content of what Adoboli did at work, of course, that truly distinguished him from his colleagues. This is where any detective work should have come in. The fact that he was able to succeed in his deception for so long – some three years – highlights the difficulties involved in identifying such illicit activities.