Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 921 EAN: 9780316518567 ISBN: 0316518565 Label: Little Brown and Company Manufacturer: Little Brown and Company Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 272 Publication Date: 1996-03 Publisher: Little Brown and Company Sales Rank: 677867 Studio: Little Brown and Company
Amazon.com ReviewHow could one trader bring down the banking empire that had funded the Napoleonic Wars? This is the story of Nick Leeson, the young gambler who found himself sucked into a terrifying spiral of loss. Disingenuous but nevertheless compelling, this is a portrait of Leeson -- the working-class boy who lived high, at least for a while, in an upper-class world -- and of Barings, banker to the English peerage, but also of the organized chaos that is the Singaporean money market.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Mind the details or pay the price; just ask Barings' mgmt team
Rogue Trader is an interesting tale of one man's rise and fall in the fast-paced world of derivatives trading. A reader would likely need to possess an interest in business/derivatives to fully appreciate the nuts and bolts of the story. I remember Leeson needing for the Nikkei to finish at 19,000 or better for all of the options he had been selling to pay off. Would these be puts or calls? Anyone reading this review, of course, knows the answer, but I can imagine this being very dull and tedious ... Read More
Rating: - A sort of one-man Enron
Nick Leeson was a sort of one-man Enron. He apparently was making unbelievable profits, but it was all fake.
The theme of his confessional book is that he should not have been able to get away with it as long as he did. That's true.
But there is another theme, which he does not quite seem to get. His bosses were rotten managers, willing to overlook his absurd coverup as long as he seemed to be generating huge profits for Barings Bank. But Leeson himself was a rotten manager. ... Read More
Rating: - SLK trade
one question comes up in my mind after reading the book. The OTC trade that leeson did with Spear, Leeds and Kellogg. If Simon Jones(or anybody) was just a litlle bit confused, why dident somebody just make contact with SLK? Then they would have know right away that there was no trade with SLK. Just making this call would have been very simple and would have uncover the true posititon.
The fact that Coopers and lybrand,an independed auditor, dident discover the losses is strange. But well acomplished ... Read More
Rating: - Surprisingly unsophisticated
Somehow Nick Leeson ended up with the reputation as some kind of whiz kid but reading this book you get a different sense. The derivatives Mr. Leeson was trading do not seem particularly sophisticated (don't compare this to LTCM). But you wouldn't learn much about them from this book. I got the sense that Mr. Leeson was grappling with very basic financial questions. As a consequence, the book tends to be repetitive in a description of losses getting out of control and the soap opera building around that. You ... Read More
Rating: - this guy is unbelievable
The author appears to be one of the most character-challenged individuals of all-time, a major piece of work. By accumulating incredible unauthorized trading losses of around one billion dollars, he single-handedly brought down one of the oldest banking institutions in England, and left countless people without jobs and investments worth millions. What is absolutely amazing is the fact that while he never denies the fraud he committed, throughout the book he seems intent on blaming his superiors for their inability ... Read More
- Mind the details or pay the price; just ask Barings' mgmt team
- SLK trade
- Surprisingly unsophisticated
