![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rogue Trader
Dec. 13th, 2013 10:32 amI had my last final yesterday. Afterwards, I went home, had a shot of rum (I cannot express to you how much pain my neck and shoulders were in after hunching over my notes for ten hours on Wednesday, then hunching over a test for three), and watched Rogue Trader.
Rogue Trader is a movie about Nick Leeson, the guy who, by himself, brought down Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in the world, by speculating on the Nikkei. The movie was not a commercial success (and the poster for it is a complete lie about the type of movie it is) and I can kind of see why. It's not really dramatic unless you understand what it is he was doing. There's a lot of him explaining futures and margin calls to his staff/the audience, and since he ran away at the end and was arrested changing planes in Germany, there isn't even a big dramatic confrontation.
The thing is, though, that now, as I'm watching it, I'm watching the auditors and going noooo! That's why you always get bank confirmations from the bank mailed directly to you! You never get that stuff from the client! What is wrong with you! Can you not see he faxed the documentation to you from his home fax machine in the middle of the night? Doesn't that worry you?
Overall, it's pretty much a demonstration of everything I've just spent a semester learning about internal controls. Cause there were plenty of red flags, but every time someone raised an objection, someone else charged in, saying, but he's making us so much money! Look at all the trades he's doing! So even though Barings had internal risk management structures, they were entirely ineffective because they had no power to actually stand up to the traders.
Next on the watch list, Boiler Room.
Rogue Trader is a movie about Nick Leeson, the guy who, by himself, brought down Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in the world, by speculating on the Nikkei. The movie was not a commercial success (and the poster for it is a complete lie about the type of movie it is) and I can kind of see why. It's not really dramatic unless you understand what it is he was doing. There's a lot of him explaining futures and margin calls to his staff/the audience, and since he ran away at the end and was arrested changing planes in Germany, there isn't even a big dramatic confrontation.
The thing is, though, that now, as I'm watching it, I'm watching the auditors and going noooo! That's why you always get bank confirmations from the bank mailed directly to you! You never get that stuff from the client! What is wrong with you! Can you not see he faxed the documentation to you from his home fax machine in the middle of the night? Doesn't that worry you?
Overall, it's pretty much a demonstration of everything I've just spent a semester learning about internal controls. Cause there were plenty of red flags, but every time someone raised an objection, someone else charged in, saying, but he's making us so much money! Look at all the trades he's doing! So even though Barings had internal risk management structures, they were entirely ineffective because they had no power to actually stand up to the traders.
Next on the watch list, Boiler Room.