I wager someone with your experience could tell us a great deal about derivatives.
What was amazing about Madoff's 40 year scam was that he never made a single trade. He simply put the billions from his "investors" into a Chase Manhattan bank account. A single account. It had billions of dollars in it. Madoff would pay his older investors their impossibly large yearly returns using the newer money from recent victims - a classic Ponzi. Madoff admitted he was amazed that neither Chase nor the SCC bothered to even question him about that bank account.
Madoff didn't care who he robbed. When the 2008-2009 crash caused his investors to demand their cash back, he didn't care who he robbed. He equally took his secretary's life savings of $150K and his childhood friend's half a Billion with equal gusto. Both lost everything. Some of Madoff's clients lost 2, 3, or 4 Billion.
Our Federal and State governments are also running Ponzi schemes. Everyone knows it. Ponzi schemes always fail.
J. Paul Getty robbed his own grandmother (financially) on a Christmas Eve, long ago, to fund his oil company. True story.