http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsb...price.html
"Mr Perkins' trading stopped for a few hours, but in the early hours of the morning, he returned to the oil market via his laptop. He placed an incredible $520m in orders through ICE Futures Europe, where traders can buy or sell crude oil for future delivery and bet on whether prices will go up or down. The first trade was at 1.22am was at $71.40 per barrel and the last trade at 3.41am was at $73.05. During this period, Mr Perkins gradually edged up the price by bidding higher each time, until he was responsible for 69pc of the global market volume.
By 6.30am, the broker appeared to have realised what he'd done. He sent a text message to the managing director claiming an unwell relative meant he would not be coming in to work and started disposing of the oil futures. When PVM challenged his story, the broker confessed and later co-operated fully with the FSA inquiry."
Amazing story - the guy made $520 million in trades in a few hours, racked up $10 million in losses, which his bosses then had to honor. Money quote is:
"Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk".
He ended up being fined 72k pounds for the incident, and was banned from trading for 5 years. He later found a job writing training manuals for new recruits to a Swiss biofuels-brokerage company.
More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_futures...g_incident
"Mr Perkins' trading stopped for a few hours, but in the early hours of the morning, he returned to the oil market via his laptop. He placed an incredible $520m in orders through ICE Futures Europe, where traders can buy or sell crude oil for future delivery and bet on whether prices will go up or down. The first trade was at 1.22am was at $71.40 per barrel and the last trade at 3.41am was at $73.05. During this period, Mr Perkins gradually edged up the price by bidding higher each time, until he was responsible for 69pc of the global market volume.
By 6.30am, the broker appeared to have realised what he'd done. He sent a text message to the managing director claiming an unwell relative meant he would not be coming in to work and started disposing of the oil futures. When PVM challenged his story, the broker confessed and later co-operated fully with the FSA inquiry."
Amazing story - the guy made $520 million in trades in a few hours, racked up $10 million in losses, which his bosses then had to honor. Money quote is:
"Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk".
He ended up being fined 72k pounds for the incident, and was banned from trading for 5 years. He later found a job writing training manuals for new recruits to a Swiss biofuels-brokerage company.
More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_futures...g_incident
