the finance industry / wall street

ts your maddie vs our maddie

Adoboli (who, let me stress, has yet to enter a plea) was in exchange traded funds – which used to look like unit trusts, but have got increasingly complicated. One of the top market regulators, Mario Draghi, recently described ETFs as "reminiscent of what happened in the securitisation market before the crisis". Read that quote again: he's comparing them to sub-prime mortgages. Most of us should get very worried; rogue traders should go steaming in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/19/brain-food-ubs-kweku-adoboli/print

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/09/16/why-financial-reform-hasnt-stopped-rogue-traders/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/business/dodd-frank-act-is-a-target-on-gop-campaign-trail.html

Republicans say Dodd-Frank is the root of some of today’s economic problems. It has stopped banks from lending to “job creators,” they contend, and is a direct cause of high unemployment. “It created such uncertainty that the bankers, instead of making loans, pulled back,” said Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, speaking at a South Carolina rally over Labor Day weekend where he again called for the law’s repeal.

ahahahaha

hahahah

haha

...

*shoots self*

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,788462,00.html

for this headline I am not against journalistic muckraking

Jérôme Kerviel, gambled away billions in 2010. He is still serving a three-year jail sentence.

p cool how you can lose billions and just do 3 years in a minimum security jail

that study sounds pretty weak but oh well i'm still always happy when people push the psychopath angle, cuz if there were a cultural and spiritual system that caused and possibly even mandated people who were not psychopaths to behave like psychopaths that system might benefit from review

never review ILM, please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAWv9gV8Cxo&feature=related

yeesh

hahaha! they rule! literally.

you would think they could afford better cameras

and thrones

they should throw blood diamonds at all the passing hippies.

i'm no help cuz i kinda hate all the people involved. the cops, the fatcats, the hippies. they all need some billy club action.

The Hibernian Express will shave six milliseconds off that time.
Of course, verifiable figures are elusive and estimates vary wildly, but it is claimed that a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to $100m (£63m) a year to the bottom line of a large hedge fund.

This is kind of the real plot of the latest William Gibson novel

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/low-latency-network-to-connect-london-and-hong-kong-40545

A high-speed fibre network between London and Hong Kong could help decrease financial trading times

Financial traders and law firms are set to benefit from a new low-latency network between London and Hong Kong, which can conduct data on a round trip from Europe to Asia in around 176 milliseconds.

The cable network, run by UK-based trading technology company BSO Network Solutions, has been in place for some time, but previously had to route around large parts of Russia, due to difficulties laying fibre in that country.

However, a new lower latency and higher availability ‘Transit Mongolia’ connection has helped to reduce the time of a round trip by more than 20 milliseconds during the last 12 months. Improvements have also been made at BSO’s Ancotel point-of-presence (POP) in Frankfurt and Mega-I POP in Hong Kong.

the real reason they are installing these new high speed pipes is to have the world's best COD5 ping time

Some dude in my building just volunteered to me out of the blue that he's been camping out on Wall Street.

I guess I kind of support that except I don't really understand the protest. There doesn't seem to be any focus or goal.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/protesting-in-real-america_25.html

alfred posted this yesterday, it's a good take I think

This dude can barely contain his excitement at the crash he hopes is coming:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15059135

(Excesses: pink tie)

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-street-activists-disrupt-sothebys-art-auction/1316786413

This is pretty effective actually, I think.

would love to punch the champagne drinkers in the face -- BUT WITH THAT SAID the troll inside me applauds

OTM

yeah you have to admire them. they should do coke too, though

I would love a glass of champagne now tbh

Pay a liberal arts grad to bring you one

I wish they would drive through the crowd in Bentleys shouting "Pardon me, but if you'd be so kind as to step aside, I've an appointment with the president of the federal reserve. Oh, and do you have any grey poupon?"

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/goldman_sachs_has_reduced_its.html

lmao, these guys,

Oh, and do you have any grey poupon?"

As if they'd ever touch that vulgar stuff!

It has also gone mostly cashless in the cafeteria and other areas, eliminating the need to pay armored truck companies to haul away the money.

fwiw this seems like an appropriate thread for our friend Alessio Rastani if u guys haven't seen him yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA

feel like goldman sachs should mandate an iv drip and colostomy bag so that traders never have to leave their desks

There's some talk that that guy's a Yes Men-style satirist, but it's too hard to tell anymore.

Perrin takes note of the sneering at Wall St Occupiers:

The Times and others of their class despise democracy. Demonstrations count only in official enemy states. At home, it's unnecessary. Petulant. Naive.

How serious can these kids really be? They use laptops and iPhones to communicate and spread their message. If they were truly radical, they'd use cardboard megaphones. Hand signs. Smoke signals. Using The Man's technology is hypocritical.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-never-tells.html

For you fans in D.C.: he's moving there!

If Rastani is a satirist, he's built up a somewhat convincing web presence for his stock trading stuff (although I wouldn't put it past the Yes Men or other satirists to do that). Even if he's not though, who is he, exactly? Some trader? Being a trader doesn't make you privvy to any special or secret information, and a lot of traders are idiots. He might be right, he might be wrong, but why was he being interviewed exactly?

nah yeah rastani seems like the real thing

the telegraph has got to the heart of it: he's not a hoaxer, but he's kind of a fake:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8792829/BBC-financial-expert-Alessio-Rastani-Im-an-attention-seeker-not-a-trader.html

it's definitely a variation on poe's law

but I mean if you have ever read a book chronicling the lives of wall street traders (and yes, even w/ the bias), you'll know why he passes the sniff test; he's just parroting what every trader out there is thinking atm.

dude isn't really helping the cause imho

I mean as far as I can tell from what I'm reading, I could just as easily call myself a "trader" in the sense he means it, i.e. someone who sits in his underwear and buys and sells stocks from time to time.

boy, that video is a hit in lib blogs today.

does that surprise you

Not a bit.

ok now i'm puzzled by this guy

i guess he got what he wanted?

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiWlvBro9eI&feature=player_embedded#!

not him tho