Volunteer
How to go from the IT dept to being a rogue trader
How to be a rogue trader As a City headhunter I’m repeatedly asked to explain how lone traders find themselves flushing billions of dollars down the toilet. Rogue traders can pop up just about anywhere, and so I’ll share this curriculum for you to follow, which is not specific to any bank: this is just the way it works. Being …
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Tuesday 20th September 2011 23:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
You can't have writers who know what they're talking about!
Hang on -- I've been studying the media coverage of this very closely, and I deduced that there must be a rule that anybody who writes about it must have absolutely no idea of what a trading desk does or how it does it. I know the reg is cavalier towards journalistic norms, but such this article flouts the rule followed by all other newspapers and online sources so badly that surely trouble must be on its way.
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Wednesday 21st September 2011 05:43 GMT amanfromMars 1
BOFH Heaven
"..and as the regulators invent new rules that they pretend will make the markets safer."
Amen. And that is Achilles Heel, for to know how the Game is rigged, allows Stealthy Android Progress in Virtual Machine Worlds creating Live Operational Virtual Environments with Future Play Controls 42 Command Energy in SMART Cloud Layers with NEUKlearer HyperRadioproActive IT Powers.
Novel constructive and disruptive Intellectual Property able to collapse empires built without proper dreams and perfect preparation and planning to prevent piss-poor performance and sub-prime reward, is a mighty powerful force.
"Traders are hostile to IT departments because they see them as black holes sucking money out of bonus pools and delivering little of any use any time soon. This is why front office want their own IT people."
Such a pity that they don't both recognise themselves as being, although nominally independent of each other, ideally interdependent upon each other for the delivery of excellence ..... which paints things with a suitably wide and ambiguous brush so as not to have anyone wasting time on specifics.
Of course, you may have to consider that the nature and mechanics of trading have fundamentally changed with insider dealing on zeroday trading of systemic vulnerabilities, a colossal underground black economy spinner, and if the front office can't beat them, would it be wise to enjoin with them.?!
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Wednesday 21st September 2011 08:59 GMT John Smith 19
It was *always* the enemy within.
They don't need your IP address.
They don't need your website to be plugged into your back office systems.
They got past your security screening (assuming you do it).
They're just waiting to get enough information together to make their move.
As long as people remain ignorant they won't have to wait long.
Mine's the one with a copy of "The Consultant" in the pocket. It's 30 years old.
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Wednesday 21st September 2011 12:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Soon to be outsourced...
"Some of the smartest IT guys on the planet work in investment banks, but looking at the systems they use for risk and compliance you’d think their software had been developed in a joint venture between Capita and Accenture."
Reading this while sitting opposite an Accenture 'transition team' did make me laugh, but at the same time I was a little bit sick in my mouth...
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Wednesday 21st September 2011 15:11 GMT Mike Hocker
Perfect Code
Spot on. I knew a bloke who wrote darn near perfect error free code. Of course, that meant it was viewed as easy to do and he wasn't going anywhere-- so he eventually left the company.
A further hint for rogues:
Good enough quick enough to meet schedules gets you further, even better if all the software is "self documenting" with just a few comments to jog your own memory when inevitable changes or fixes are needed. Never remove dead code. You'll remember it is zombie, but anyone else trying to figure it out will have no idea what the mystery code does and will fear to touch it. Don't update section comments either-- if anyone wonders why the comments don't match the code, it is because of "time pressure" when some change was made, or perhaps an oversight (be apologetic, since whoever is asking obviously has a least a semblance of a clue and is therefore useful and needs to be suborned).
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Wednesday 21st September 2011 17:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
the worst thing you can do
If you want to get anywhere in a bank's IT department, is to write perfect code. If it just goes out there, on time, and works without issue, no-one notices it, and you get no credit.
If you do a piss poor job, and it goes horrifically wrong, losing the company money left right and centre, you get to be the guy seen fixing everything after the shit has hit the fan, and get hailed as a saviour!
Front office IT can be a great laugh at times. My favourite was when an architect asked a business area "So, you essentially want to replace a custom built distributed IT system, with all of the user control, and infrastructure already in place for thousands of users, with an Excel spreadsheet that someone in your team knocked up over a weekend?" He went off in a huff after getting the answer.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
