Traders joking, the beginning - page 725

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Some people just have a way with words, and other people … oh … not have way.

 
President Obama surprised his White House staffers with a private concert by Bruce Springsteen to thank them for their work over the last eight years. Meanwhile, Trump thanked his supporters with a performance by a Bruce Springsteen cover brand’s drummer’s DJ friend.
 
 

If you don’t think trading mistakes will happen to you, just take a look at what some “pros” did:

2003: Shares in now-bankrupt internet firm Exodus surged more than 59000% after a bank trader accidentally bid $100 for shares that were trading around 17 cents at the time!
 
2002: A colossal blunder by Bear Stearns saw the firm sell $4 billion worth of stock at the closing bell instead of the intended $4 million! Fortunately for the firm, they were only filled on $600m or so of the orders before realizing their goof.
 
2001: Just before the close of the UK market, a fat-fingered Lehman Bros employee mistakenly sold $500m worth of stock - 100 times the intended amount. The slip-up temporarily dropped the FTSE more than 2%!
 
2001: An absent-minded UBS trader hoping to sell 16 shares of Japanese company Dentsu at 600000 yen each mistakenly sold 600000 shares at 16 yen each! Before he knew it, the trader was already $120m in the hole..
 
1998: Perhaps the most classic blunder of all time was made by a now-infamous Salomon trader who is said to have accidentally sold £850m worth of French government bonds......simply by leaning on his keyboard!
 
The popularity of technical or quantitative trading models increases with increasing computer power ranging from simple moving-average systems to complex neural network algorithms. Unfortunately most, if not all, models have built-in biases, so an unquestioning belief in them is extremely dangerous. To prove this point, a famous study was conducted where thousands of different indicators and technical tools were tested in an effort to find the best forecaster of US GDP growth. After an exhaustive search and countless regressions, one leading indicator was found that seemed to fit the data perfectly: buttermilk production rates in Bangladesh! Yet I still have not figured out how to get that on my Bloomberg.
 
A Russian billionaire reportedly paid over $4 million to have Mariah Carey and Sir Elton John perform at his teenage granddaughter’s wedding. Said his teenage granddaughter, “Who are these people?”
 
 
The White House has admitted that Donald Trump did not write his inauguration speech. The speech was written late last Thursday by a disgruntled postal worker.
 
There were marches across all seven continents, including Antarctica. To be fair to Trump, the protest in Antarctica was just the March of the Penguins.
 
Rapper Snoop Dogg recently revealed that country music singer Willie Nelson is the only person who can “out-smoke” him. And then someone said, “Snoop, that’s a mop.”
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