A $251 Million Typo 415
theodp writes "A Taiwan stock trader is jobless after a typo left her company looking at a paper loss of more than $12 million when what was supposed to have been a small order mistakenly resulted in a $251 million purchase. 'Something like this is difficult to explain to superiors,' a company exec explained."
Haha (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Haha (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Haha (Score:2)
Probably this is just a trick by Merrill Lynch. (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably this is just a trick by a Merrill Lynch publicist, who found a way to get free publicity. Or, maybe it is a way to distract people from some fraud involving the Taiwanese firm and Merrill Lynch.
Otherwise the story just doesn't make sense. To believe the story, Fubon cuts loss to NT$50 mil. in NT$8 bil. mistake [chinapost.com.tw], as it was written, you have to believe that the Taiwan firm hires inexperienced people, gives them little training, and does not review their large trades.
Do you really believe that a
Re:Probably this is just a trick by Merrill Lynch. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see, jump from a claim that this is 'publicity for Merrill Lynch' (WTF!?) to an accusation that this is some massive fraud perpetrated between Fubon and Merrill Lynch (which must be so blindingly obvious to the poster since he/she backs this up with, well, zero facts and much wild speculation).
Then a non-sequitur about Fubon Securities stock rising a miniscule amount.
Then a litany of guilty-by-association links.
Then more wild speculation (Oh, there are books about it! No one who writes a book could lie, or be mistaken, or be a fucking inept retard!).
So this poster makes the four thousand leaps of faith from typing error to widespread corruption, and gets modded insightful.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Re:Probably this is just a trick by Merrill Lynch. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's possible that there's fraud here, and as such should probably be investigated. But it's also possible that it's a case of CYA and the trader was on the losing end. After all, how do you explain the phrase "Something like this is difficult to explain to superiors" by "a Fubon executive"? Could it just be that he's trying to cover his own incompetence in managing his people?
Stop the corruption, or you will lose money, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
This subject is important. Tens of thousands of employees and investors have lost their entire life savings because of the corporate fraud in the United States. If the corruption isn't stopped, it can happen to you.
Anyone who reads some of the books about the Enron fraud [enronfraud.com] and the WorldCom fraud [bbc.co.uk] and the Tyco fraud [edgarsnyder.com], will learn that the fraud is accomplished partly by deceptive trading. It is not only the authors of the books who think that Merrill Lynch was involved in deceptive trading; the SEC and FBI think that too, as the links in the grandparent comment, to U.S. government web sites, show.
Look at this quote from the linked article: "Chen Ming-tai, TSE president, said Fubon dealers made the mistake by injecting NT$7.7 billion from one of their international clients [Merrill Lynch] into the market to purchase various stocks issued by 282 companies at the highest prices of the day."
Who selected the 282 companies? If you have read the books about the fraud, it is easy to guess that they were all losing Merrill Lynch investments that the company wanted off its books. That's only a guess, but it is an educated guess, given what has aleady happened. On the other hand, it is not easy to understand some of the deceptions. Sometimes investigators have required months to uncover the sneaky behavior.
Look at this quote from the BBC article linked in the grandparent comment: "A Taiwanese stock brokerage that mistakenly bought $255 [Million U.S. dollars]..." That is more than a quarter of a billion dollars! How is it possible that the financial instruments of 282 companies can be selected by one keystroke error? How is it possible that someone who was "unfamiliar with the company's new computer trading programme" could spend $255,000,000 with a single keystroke error?
A situation has been arranged in which we are not allowed to know the name of the employee who supposedly made the error. My guess is that the employee on whom this is blamed is not aware of any error. That would mean that this could easily be a story invented by his managers.
If you read the books about the frauds, you will read about literally hundreds of deceptive practices such as the one I am suggesting here.
Many people in the U.S. seem to want to be ignorant and stay ignorant about the corruption, as is seen by reading some of the responses to the grandparent comment.
Re:Stop the corruption, or you will lose money, to (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an old saying - "If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is". People should stop looking to the government to bail them out when their greed gets excessive. If you invested in Enron and got burned, I feel bad for you, but I don't really think that it's a federal matter. We have 100 years of market data that suggests that anything over an 11% return is risky. So just because your broker or the company CEO tells you that they're going to make you millions of dollars, you have to turn on the common sense filter to see if it's right. This is why I didn't buy Netscape or Enron, and have no plans to buy Google. I'm thrilled with an 8% return on a stable issue rather than a 100% return on an unstable one.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that we shouldn't indict people who cheat the system. I'm just saying that a con artist is only as good as those people who are willing to trust them. Anyone who has been swindled has to accept the fact that they were a willing participant in the scheme. Once you're willing to admit that you were wrong, then you'll look at future "opportunities" with much more discretion.
Re:Probably this is just a trick by Merrill Lynch. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not knowing all the facts of the case, I'm not willing to jump into the premise that there is a larger multi-corporation conspiracy involving Merrill Lynch but it is almost certain that the Taiwanese trading firm is not telling the truth and that this is a cover story.
Just goes to show how guilable people are. Tell them any old story--no matter how ridiculous--and not only will they believe it, but they will also defend it.
Now, as for the claim that "most of what is written about the financial markets is fraudulent in some way" -- you care to back that up? Because thats a statement with almost no content other than a manipulative intent to induce the reader to distrust what is written about the markets. Even if the fraud tally is "billions of dollars", that is a small fraction of the overall market size and furthermore, your claim wasn't about fraudulent market activity but rather fraudulent writings concerning market activity. Which is all very confusing.
I think caution should be taken when extrapolating from a single instance of what _appears_ to be a non-truth. The fact that a given firm is making dubious claims does not necessarily imply or play into larger conspiracy themes.
Re:Haha (Score:3, Funny)
Nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is she getting fired and not trained?
AXJZTOS
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, it is merely a happy coincidence that they will probably profit from the stock. It could be much worse.
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Great - you've just fired the one employee you know will always and forever more, triple check everything she ever does.
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you be certain that will be true if there's no negative consequence for not doing it?
Hint: No.
Re:Nice... (Score:2)
no negative consequence
Yep. I'm sure the next morning at work would have been just great for her. How would you feel?
Re:Nice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now Nick Leeson, this guy is going to have a hard time living down his adventure in derivatives
'Speculative trading in derivatives gained a great deal of notoriety in 1995 when Nick Leeson, a trader at Barings Bank, made poor and unauthorized investments in index futures. Through a combination of poor judgment on his part, lack of oversight by management, a naive regulatory environment and unfortunate outside events, Leeson incurred a 1.3 billion dollar loss that bankrupted the centuries old financial institution.'
It isn't every day you destroy a fundamental financial institution with a multi-century history.
Re:Nice... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the stock, they apparently already sold it again at a loss. See this post:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154642&cid
Jw
sanity checking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sanity checking (Score:5, Interesting)
He's dead on.
Not the trader should be fired but the manager who failed to check (or rather: ask someone to check...) their system for fundamental flaws like that.
Typo's happen. Mistakes generally happen when humans are involved.
Critical systems must be designed to deal with that and firing the poor soul who got fucked over by this broken system is not going to fix it.
A simple keyjam can turn 10mio into 1000mio anytime...
Re:Oh come on (Score:3, Informative)
Re:sanity checking (Score:5, Insightful)
> validation...includes sanity checking to make sure data are within reasonable ranges, and requiring
> additional confirmation (ranging from "Whoa, dude! That much?" to supervisor approval) when input is outside that.
Have to disagree. -If- developers in such organizations were designers and architects, I would agree, and I certainly agree that such checks are needed on core financial systems.
However, confirmation and supervisor approval, and determining what is reasonable in terms of range checks is a business decision, not a coder decision. If software development in the business world was usually done right, then the developer would have the background and skills to do this. Typically, they don't even have the background to know to recommend such things.
IMHO, this is why neither the trader nor the developer (probably; this case may not be like the typical one I described) should be held accountable. The people in charge of the decisions that led to this deficiency in the software -and- the business processes it supports should be held responsible and forced to fix the problem.
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Funny)
"I miss you hunny and I can't wait to see you this weekend ;) ...",
I typed,
"Jesus Christ woman you have ruined my life and I've been cheating on you with your sister!!"
... I hate keyboards...
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nice... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nice... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Informative)
Wish you were her (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
o Have a maximum transaction limit for each person
o Require the person to enter the number twice
o Require the person to enter the amount in words as well as digits (just like in a personal cheque).
What if they had a disgruntled employee who was determined to collapse the company, or had a gambling addiction?
Great idea! (Score:3, Funny)
So now you're going to require them to know how to spell as well as trade stock? If their employees have the spelling skills of most Slashdot readers, their work would NEVER get done...
"Let's see - buy 100 shares...Wun hundert...One hunderd...On hunndred..."
That's where they got the video [ronald-dupont.com] of the guy smashing his monitor...
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone makes mistakes. Especially with manual data entry.
The Wall Street Journal has editors that check their journalists info. Why? You can't doublecheck your own writing. You read what you meant to write as opposed to what you did write.
Developers can't be effective beta testers for their own product? Why? They will not see the holes in their own logic.
Management needs to ha
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
She's the scape goat - if she doesn't get fired one of the higher execs will. I work in a large bank and the answer to this problem is business processes. The "head honchos" don't want to get fired for putting place an IT system and a business process that allows a single individual to do this kind of thing by mistake, and so are firing her to save their bacon.
Re:Nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
What will make you go "huh?" even more is that normally the person that is fired is someone that really doesn't have a part in the problem. I got fired from one job for non-completion of a project that I wasn't even in control of. But, if all the managers are nodding who's to say that I didn't have anything to
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are unspoken rules in this kind of thing. In my experience, the only risk of a high ranking exec losing his/her job over this is if there is someone at a similar or higher rank who had it in for them anyway.
How does this work? Someone calls a meeting to explain they've just lost 300 million. In most cases they will all agree that the most important thing to do is to find who seems to be directly responsible and fire them, and once that is done, come up with an "Action Plan" to avoid it happening again. The Action Plan bit is where they fix the real issue, and they will then congratulate themselves on having addressed the issue promptly and efficiently. The only time the question of why "promptly and efficiently" didn't mean before it happened is if the implementation was the work of a single person or small group of people that could also be made into blame carriers. The higher up the ladder those people are, the less likely there's someone higher to point it out, and so often it's the shop floor worker who pushed the light green button and not the dark green one, when in fact the buttons should have been RED and GREEN. This kind of thing happens at all levels of hierarchy, but of becomes more obvious once you reach the levels that can "fire at whim".
If the owners are stockholders, it's even simpler - they won't even care if you can present the bottom line performance in such a way that this doesn't even appear (it's probably a relatively small sum for such a place..) - or better still you can present the action plan to the stockholders in such a way as it will stop this kind of mistake and also make the company more reliable, efficient and therefore competitive and the stockholders won't even care who actually is responsible. SOX404, which has very much a pyramid of responsibilities for many things, including "operational risk control" (of which this is a case) may change this, but we'll have to wait and see. Right now all it's doing is costing companies a great deal of money, and is unfortunately too often being approached in a "cover your ass" manner, rather than as proper risk control.
Even harder to explain... (Score:5, Interesting)
hard to explain to superiors... (Score:5, Funny)
I propose laying off those superiors instead, as they have trouble understanding something that can be quite easily explained in a slashdot summary...
One person definitely can kill a company (Score:2)
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/caseclosed/nickleeson.
This is weird. (4-eyes principle? release order?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Eurex is fine, but when the staff using the application is limited, you don't get separation of duties or rotation of duties, and you can still be faced with a setup where 1 user has too much power.
How can such a mistake be made? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
(I am not a stock broker but I did work at a financial advisor and yay my NDA period expired).
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:5, Interesting)
This actually happened to me once - I bought 100,000 of a derivative instead of 10,000 using an online system. Interestingly the issuer's trader noticed that I had put most of them straight back on the market and rang my broker who rang me and asked me if I wanted to reverse the transaction. Very thoughtful of him...
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
He kept his job and they have enough envelopes to last for years.
We'll never let him forget it, though.
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
Do you really wish to buy $251 million worth of SCOX?
[CANCEL] [OK]
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/363/30.gif [osdir.com]
OK/Cancel dialogs are bad (Score:5, Informative)
dialogbox(introduction, button1text, [button2text, [button3text, [...]]])
The platform decides the height and width of the dialogbox and the buttons based on the contents. Button placement is decided by the button texts: if several button texts are short, they are placed in a horizontal row. Return value is the number of the button pushed.
This makes the platform simpler with only one dialogbox function for any number of buttons. It encourages developers to make the buttons meaningful. And consumers read the buttons rather than "click OK" because every dialogbox is different.
Bad:
Are you certain you want to give away $1 million?
[OK] [Cancel]
Good:
[Give away $1 million]
[Let me try something else]
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
also, when you're trading on the market, sometimes every second counts. i know for a huge order like this, it's better to be safe and maybe lose a couple thousand dollars for the delay and double check everything, but that type of
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
It may be easy to have typos in ticker symbols, but when you read the full company's name, you'll know you made a mistake for sure when you're suppose to invest in some tech company, but the company displayed is a clothing company.
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
[ RANDOM CODE HERE ]
[ TEXT BOX ]
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
With the banking systems I work on there's always at least one authorisation stage, sometimes two, so that not only can typos like this be spotted before it's sent for processing, but also to spot fraudulent transactions.
Her bosses heads should roll, not her's. (Score:2)
To me the end-user didn't create the problem (sure she made a type, it happens), but the procedures and the risk-management are at fault here. Her head should not roll, it's her bosses, the risk-management heads etc...
Re:How can such a mistake be made? (Score:2)
What to say when you stuff up? (Score:2, Funny)
* "Where is that 'undo' button?"
* "I think I might take my lunch break now..."
* "...MUMMY!!!..."
* "#*#@(!!!!...now stay calm...breath 1 2 3....$(#(#$*$!!!
* "Urmmm....'Oops?'"
Keyboard? (Score:4, Interesting)
A Taiwan stock trader mistakenly bought $251 million worth of shares with a misstroke of her computer keyboard
to
Fubon said that the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems,
I wonder if I missed a revolution in keyboard technology that made it impossible to adapt to "new systems" quickly?
More details (Score:2)
Re:Keyboard? (Score:2)
To me, this sounds as though she simply didn't double-check what she typed, and that she was supposedly unfamiliar with that "new systems" sounds like an excuse.
Re:Keyboard? (Score:4, Interesting)
She should take her employer to court. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:She should take her employer to court. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:She should take her employer to court. (Score:2)
User Training! (Score:2, Insightful)
On the job training (Score:5, Insightful)
Sucks that such a costly mistake was made. Next time maybe they should ensure that their employees know what they're doing before putting them live on trades.
As Mr. Comb-Over would say... (Score:2)
2004 calling, (Score:2)
Just one dismissal?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Not so. Here's the official press release [fubongroup.com.tw].
Fubon Securities settles stock trading error in timely fashion.
Under the fundamental principle of not affecting the local stock market, Fubon Securities today smoothly unloaded all NT$7.7 billion worth of shares it mistakenly purchased yesterday for a client by inadvertently keying in an incorrect figure, with its own dealer department absorbing some NT$5 billion worth of the shares unloaded. The company will properly adjust its shareholding positions based on market conditions.
Fubon Securities said that immediately after the undesirable error occurred, the company activated its crisis management system and sold off NT$800 million worth of shares yesterday. The firms crisis-handling panel, under the principle of minimizing any possible impact on the local bourse, smoothly unloaded all remaining positions in mistakenly purchased shares today, with some NT$5 billion worth of stock certificates in 230 issues taken over by the firms own dealer department. Judging from todays performance in the local stock market, the massive corrective operation did not in any way have negative impact on the bourse.
As investors are concerned about the impact of this event on the earnings performances of both Fubon Securities and Fubon Financial, Fubon Securities reports that total losses ensuing from the stock-unloading operation did not exceed NT$470 million and were equivalent to the firms total pretax earnings recorded in the first five months of the year. If including the increased earnings in June caused by an upturn in stock turnover, Fubon Securities earnings for the first half of the year will still surpass those of some other local brokerage houses. The firm is still guardedly optimistic about its overall earnings record for the full year, based on prospects for the economy in the second half of the year.
Of course, all those numbers are in Taiwan dollars...
I just feel sorry for the woman who lost her job because some idiot forgot to make a big, red "WARNING" page in software that important.
Where is clippy when you need him?! "Hi, it looks like your trying to buy a quarter billion dollars of stock! Can I help? I suggest MSFT instead."
Re:Posting anon because I do this in my job (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad Interface? (Score:5, Funny)
Warning: You're about to spend $251,000,000! That is a lot of Fucking money! Are you sure you wish to continue [OK] [Cancel]
Hey now... I know you said ok... but that really is a fuckload of money.. are you serious about this purchase? [OK] [Cancel]
Ok... But don't say I didn't warn ya. Please press the OK button 50 more times to confirm or Cancel if you change your mind [OK] [Cancel]
Seriously tho.. $12 million in losses... Why not fire some programmers while you're at it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Bad Interface? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's how I would have designed the application:
Are you sure you wish to continue?
[Cancel] [Spend $251,000,000]
Re:Bad Interface? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are trying to spend $251,000,000, which is more than your allocated budget.
[Don't spend $251,000,000][Request confirmation from line manager]
Pressing the second button would pop up a dialog on the line manager's computer giving details of the confirmation and requesting confirmation from someone actually authorised to spend this much money. If the line manager was not authorised to spend this much, then they would be given the same options; abort
Re:Bad Interface? (Score:5, Insightful)
[OK][Cancel] are not good UI elements, you should use descriptive buttons, prefereably verbs.
this could have triggered a chain reaction (Score:3, Funny)
Re:this could have triggered a chain reaction (Score:2)
She could have saved her job by muttering those gr (Score:2, Funny)
"It's my first day"
Doesn't pass the smell test (Score:2)
Fubon? (Score:5, Funny)
Fouled up by one number, perhaps?
In the words of a wise man... (Score:2, Funny)
Why company culture is important (Score:5, Insightful)
For several years I worked for a US bank with the highest possible bond rating. Though smaller (at the time) than the national banks we all think of today, this bank was well known for its culture of prudence and the quality of our lending.
Why is this important? Because it rolled right over into the IT departments. From suppliers to product purchasing to in house software, everything was done very much "by the book" and we didn't care if we weren't doing things the latest and greatest because we wanted to do things right. And yes, our banking systems had limits on everything so a junior banker could never make a $1,000,000 loan by misplacing a decimal.
It contrasted sharply with my stint in a dot-com where things were fast, furious, and being "by the book" was laughable. Cutting edge might have been cool then, but the bank I worked for is now one of the nations largest, and the dot-com is a dot-bomb.
and in relating reporting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot at its best. Look, if you fuck up so badly that you cause your company millions of dollars in immediate losses and expect the people in charge who enabled you to fuck up (not the ones who actually fucked up, because that's you) to take the responsibility for you instead of you, then you're a fool.
Are there going to be policy changes because of this? Of course, duh (and by the way, the article says that). Should there be recriminations for the people involved who allowed this person to do what was done? Yes, and there almost certainly will be, even if behind the scenes and out of sight. Should the person who screwed up be allowed to continue? Of course not; given the power to make such transactions they failed in a grotesque manner.
Is this person helpless? Is she unable to fend for herself in the world? Is she not responsible for her own actions, positive or negative? She did something, she screwed it up in a major way, and she should suffer the consequences of it. Other heads will roll, but before you chop the heads off of the people who allowed someone to do something massively stupid, you first fire the person who actually did something massively stupid.
I mean, really, this is kind of silly. Do you think that this person was authorized to make penny (well, whatever the Taiwanese equivalent is) stock purchases and accidentally typed six or seven more zeroes? No. Obviously this was someone authorized to make major transactions. She, unfortunately for her, accidentally made a purchase even more major than she had intended. You can blame procedures and software and management all you want, but do you really think that someone authorized to make major transactions shouldn't be really, really careful about it while doing it? And if such a person isn't, are they blameless?
Re:Ah, yes (Score:3, Insightful)
In a way that was trivially predictable and trivially preventable.
A high-performance jet fighter like the F-18 has enough control power to tear its wings off. Yet the pilot doesn't have to keep his eye glued to a force meter and pray his hand doesn't twitch: the computers predict imminent failure and forcibly prevent it. He is free to do his real job: ki
It sickens me (Score:2, Insightful)
Say what you want about unions, but as long as we have companies who treat people like this we need to have something to protect them.
(I know this happened in Taiwan, but I'm they would have been sacked in many other countries as well).
scapegoat? (Score:2)
"However, with a good outlook for stocks in the second half, there are no plans to sell the shares in the near term."
So do you WANT the shares or not? Sounds like it's not a loss after all.
Personally an employee who has made a $400mill mistake is worth keeping. They're sure to work like a slave from now on.
Re:scapegoat? (Score:2)
Re:scapegoat? (Score:2)
After all, it was their error in judgement which put her in a situation where her lack of training could cause something like this.
Man... (Score:2)
Double Entry? (Score:2, Insightful)
Eg, You wish to delete 2,432,495 rows of data. To continue, enter the number of rows:.....
Boris.
Reminds me of why I hate banking websites (Score:5, Insightful)
Tip to would-be bank websites: disable the autocomplete feature on the "Amount of funds to transfer" field. Nothing sucks like a web browser adding an extra 0 to your transfer. For that matter, disable autocomplete on all fields relating to money.
More Surprised (Score:2)
Goes to prove... (Score:2)
But seriously, remember the virus that made you agree to a T&C before it installed itself? In the T&C you agreed to let it wreak havoc on your PC and mail itself to everyone in your address book. And people just blindly clicked "okay" because they're so used to the T&C's and EULA's being these complex documents full of legalese that it's pointless for them to read because they woul
Actually her manager didnt want to fire her, (Score:5, Funny)
"Buy" & "Sell" in Chinese are confusingly simi (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if the user interface was in Chinese. In Chinese, the characters for buy [unicode.org] and sell [unicode.org] look similar. Yes, a Chinese person could easily tell them apart, but I can understand that after many hours of staring at a computer screen, one's eyes or brain might get tired and slip up.
To add to the confusion, their pronunciation differs only in tone! When I was younger, I once asked my dad to sell my HP stock. He misheard me and bought some instead. I'm sure that this is not the first such misunderstanding that has occurred in Chinese.
Re:safeguards? (Score:3, Insightful)
or even...
if (amount > big_number) {
if (confirm("This is really big. Are you sure?")) {
Re:safeguards? (Score:5, Interesting)
if amount > big_number
Its not hard stuff. Most finance companies (from my experience) do have safeguards in place, the fact this one doesn't has done far more than give it a $12m loss, it has warned the market that this company has lax risk controls and higher risk charges should be applied to it.
The trader should get fired, they are employed and payed to do an accurate job. The compliance officer should also get fired, because the buck stops with them.
Re:old news :p (Score:2)
Re:Not only that! (Score:2)
Not just a paper loss.... (Score:3, Interesting)
But there is also Opportunity Cost to consider; the benefit forgone as a result of pursuing one course of action rather than an alternative course of action.
They are planning to hold the securities, but we don't know their cost of capital (aka their borrowing rate, important as it's likely this is a leveraged positiion). Nor how much capital this particular trading desk has to play with; the amounts involved ma