Soc Gen

On Monday, January 21, 2008, concerns about deteriorating economic conditions in the United States caused a precipitous fall in the Asian markets. Investors in Hong Kong and Tokyo besieged brokerage firms. Markets in the United States happened to be closed, for the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, but U.S. stock-futures trading in foreign markets showed…

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HFT

In recent years, advances in telecommunications, computing capacity and financial software platform capabilities have seen huge growth in the field of High Frequency and Algorithmic Trading (now accounting for over 70% of all equity trades placed on US exchanges and in excess of 77% in the UK).  HFT firms (which can often make more than 80…

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UBS

How do you inform your employees that one of them has flushed $2B down the toilet – like this. Dear colleagues, We regret to inform you that yesterday we uncovered a case of unauthorized trading by a trader in the Investment Bank. We have reported it to the markets in line with regulatory disclosure obligations.…

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Alpha Or Beta

WSJ:One evening a week, a group of CEOs meets in a Manhattan psychiatrist’s office and engages in an ancient ritual. Ostensibly, it is a support group. Inevitably, it becomes a battle for dominance.”Whenever you put alpha males together, the most aggressive will overpower the others,” says T. Byram Karasu, the veteran psychiatrist who has run…

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