We have to be more clever

Marc Andreesen:

Risk Magazine -- the finance industry magazine focused on risk management -- presented, this very month, its Equity Derivatives House of the Year award for 2008 to... ta daa... Societe Generale.

Whoof. They sure did:

With one of the largest exotics books on the Street, one would imagine that Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking (SG CIB) would be licking its wounds and coping with hundreds of millions of euros in losses. There was some impact, but the losses have been relatively minor and entirely manageable, says Christophe Mianne, SG CIB's head of market activities, covering equity, derivatives, fixed income, currency and commodities in Paris.

Risk Magazine - Equity Derivatives House of the Year - Société Générale

Of course, Risk has a new story at the top of its website right now... and it's an interview with M. Mianne:

24 January - The Société Générale rogue trader knew "perfectly" how to conceal his trades with a combination of fictitious trades and rolling forward positions, according to Christophe Mianné, the new head of global equities and derivatives, who spoke exclusively to Risk today.

The unauthorised trades in European equity index futures had been going on for "a few months" in 2007, Mianné said, but "the losses were just in 2008".

"Why didn’t we see that? Because he was working before at the middle and back office and knew perfectly how to hide the positions with some fictitious transactions on, let’s say, forwards on indexes, and in terms of the VAR spread test, delta every night on the position was zero." One of the techniques he used, Mianné said, involved rolling 30-day forward positions, which were unwound just before confirmation and replaced by forwards with different counterparties. "He was very clever," he adds, "but that's not an excuse, because we have to be more clever."

Hoist by his own Petard 2.0

D'oh!

The Next Web Conference was held in Amsterdam last Friday (June 1). The organizers had a last minute speaker back-out: Plazes CEO Felix Petersen emailed them the day before the conference to say that he couldn’t make it because they were dealing with bugs on their new product, and that his “9 month old daughter has become sick.”

The problem, though, is that Peterson didn’t stay home to work on their product and take care of his daughter. He was actually attending a competing conference, Reboot, in Copenhagen.

How was this discovered? The Next Web guys used Petersen’s own Plazes, a service which shows where users are at any given time. Peterson’s Plazes account clearly showed him in Copenhagen at Reboot on June 1, drinking wine and beer, listening to music, and enjoying “incredible conversations.” “Reboot just rocks,” he writes.

TechCrunch: Plazes CEO Busted By His Own Product

Belly laugh o' the day

Outside the supermarket, a table was set up to distribute literature and gather signatures for a petition There was a big, crudely lettered sign, "Impeach Cheney Now!" (They wanted to go after Cheney first for some reason, then Bush.)

This is about par for the course for my neighborhood, so I ignored them, and I didn't notice until I was on my way out who was sponsoring the table.

One of the guys smiled earnestly said "Hi, are you ready for the impeachment?"

It was then I noticed that they were LaRouchies.

And had the best laugh I've had for weeks, much to their consternation.

Too, too funny.

Humidity and fried foods, probably

As I slide down the razor blade of life into my forties, and stoically (if I do say so myself) endure the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, why, oh why, did I wake up this morning to find a fresh zit on my chin?

At the very least, surviving until early middle age should shield one from the indignities of adolescence.

Snow day in Raleigh

The first snowfall of the year, and I'm seeing it in North Carolina. Ha!