How to Be a Rogue Trader

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Financial Times columnist John Gapper has just released a e-book that I'm really looking forward to reading: "How To Be A Rogue Trader."

I wrote a post about this sometime ago. My contention has always been that rogue trading is far more common than anyone knows. It's just the rogues are only detected when they lose too much of their firm's or their client's money. Gapper goes further, arguing that rogue tradingis woven into the very fabric of the financial system.

Here's the blurb from Amazon:

Nick Leeson at Barings, Jerome Kerviel at Societe Generale, John Rusnak at Allied Irish Bank. And now the 31 year-old Kweku Adoboli, who allegedly ran up $2.3 billion 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?

I just downloaded my copy.

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