UBS Rogue Trader Had Been "Reduced To Watching Fox News For Guidance"

This could probably explain a lot. According to the FT, which has managed to sneak a peek into Kweku Adoboli aka, the scourge of UBS, Facebook profile, in a July 31 update said: "Will they? Won’t they? Reduced to watching Fox News for guidance, it’s a grim affair". It appears that Adoboli should thus be commended - under those conditions we believe it is a miracle a person's loss can be confined to just $2 billion. FT continues with the cyberstalking: " That was followed a week later amid steep market falls, by an entry that read: “Can we shut down global markets for a week so everyone can just chill out?” It also appears that the Delta One'er (which is just a fancy name for "correlation desk" trader) enjoyed his downtime as well: "He came across as someone who worked quite hard to get where he was and played quite hard too," said the acquaintance. Yet by all counts it appears that the event that did ole' Kweku in was the Swiss intervention on September 6: "However, the final message left by the trader on his own Facebook page on September 6 simply read “need a miracle”." Odd: so does Tim Geithner and the Eurozone. Alas, as the latest "rogue trader" incarnation just found the hard way, those are in short supply these days.

So this position went bad overnight to the tune of $2 billion ?

UBS does monitor there positions daily, right ?

So how was this position - being so bad - not reviewed by anyone else than the ..... rogue trader...... ?

What a crock...

The end of the article sums it up I guess...

“Which, ironically is the first place you start looking when trying to find a scapegoat for massive losses, and a reason to announce a global monetary intervention. Just recall how Jerome Kerviel’s fun with ES was used by Bernanke as a smokescreen to cut the Fed Funds rate by 0.75% in an emergency announcement when futures were plunging on that cold day in January 2008....”

When the trade is rogue but good, it’s just business as usual...

You can say that thrice. 100% agree. All rogue traders I have researched never woke up one day deciding to see how it feels to have a naked exposure out of the blue. They had been doing that for some time (in some cases it is an entire culture of risk interplay that percolates through the entire team), and then ...eventually ...a deal goes (seriously) awry. Then suddenly the person is a rogue trader. My rule of thumb is simple ...if someone can lose a certain amount of money (rogue or not), then it means that financial institution had exceedingly poor risk control measures that border/extend to the criminal. Yet, what normally happens is some guy gets fingered as a rogue trader, as if he was the only operating cog in the entire thing. Please! I have worked in finance since the age of 21 (and with high figures - at age 22 I had a $8b portfolio), and I can assure you everything I did was tracked. If I decided to pull a Nick Leeson (Barings) or a Brian Hunter (Amaranth) I would not even have been able to effect such a trade due to the co-signatures needed. Same thing (different game though) with Maddof saying he was the 'only one' responsible. Like his staff and sons were just in that office for years not knowing that their fund valuations were based on ether and pixie dust. Please! This chap should obviously have the book thrown at him, but I can bet you serious money that he did not just wake up one morning and, on a whim, decide to see how flushing $2b felt.

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