Allegedly, a rogue trader at the French bank Societe Generale has lost over 7.2 million dollars in bad trading moves, managing to hide the damage from the corporation until it was excessively massive. 7.2 billion dollars. Think about that. Boardwalk is how much nowadays?

Of course, the question on everyone’s minds is did he get fired? Well okay, that has a pretty obvious answer, but read on for more juicy fiscal details!

Societe Generale is nice enough (now) to not publically humiliate the trader by releasing his name, but some details did emerge:

The trader:

• Was in his thirties
• Made less than 100,000 Euros a year ($140k+)
• Had been with the company since 2000

What a loyal guy! He made thousands of dollars, and lost billions. Not quite the best for business!

You would think that after the first one or two billion, he would have tried to cut his losses or at least figured out a way to not lose billions more. Though I must admit, this type of thing happens to everyone. I mean, who hasn’t lost their company billions of dollars recently? Oh that’s right, essentially everyone alive except this mystery man and the infamous Nick Leeson (Wikipedia). This man was clearly smart (well as smart as someone who manages to lose 7 billion dollars can be), as he was able to hide his losses for awhile:

Societe Generale said the trader was responsible for “plain-vanilla” futures hedging on stock market indexes in Europe, and that he was able to conceal “massive” fraudulent positions thanks to inside knowledge of back-office control procedures. The trader’s move from back-office management to front-desk trading harks back to the infamous Nick Leeson, whose position as both general manager and speculative trader for Barings Bank in Singapore helped him hide losses of over £827 million ($1.6 billion).

A London-based fund manager, who did not wish to be named, said that the positions themselves must have been “enormous”– on the order of 40 billion euros ($58.9 billion)–to lead to losses of that magnitude.

Congratulations mystery trader. You may not be rich right now, or even have a job, but you are truly one of a kind!

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