A rogue trader loses £3.7bn. Further proof that the stock market is nothing more than a fantasy world

Charlie Brooker
Monday January 28, 2008
The Guardian

Let's see if I've got this straight: an out-of-control French Cityboy has accidentally lost the Société Générale bank the grand sum of £3.7bn - a large amount by anyone's standards. And how did he do it? By betting the wrong way, then trying to dig himself out of the hole by continuing to bet the wrong way, covering up the mess he made along the way using some cunning ninja-style inside knowledge of how the system's "warning lights" worked, which meant he was pissing money away undetected until the losses grew so huge they were visible from space.

Some analysts say the actions of this one poor panicking sod may have helped cause the stock market hoo-hah that kicked off last week: nice to know that even in today's world of faceless global corporations, the little guy can still make a difference.

If it's hard to imagine what £3.7bn looks like, it's even harder to picture an absence of £3.7bn. Presumably it resembles a dark, swirling vortex, like a portal to another dimension in a supernatural thriller. All the money got sucked into it, and emerged ... um ... where? Where's it gone? Is it lodged away somewhere to the side of the stock market, slightly to the left of the screen, where computers can't get to it?

As you may have gathered, I don't understand the stock market, because it's so boring my brain refuses to get to grips with it. Say the word "economics" and I reach for my pillow. But even I know enough to realise it's largely an imaginary construct: abstract numbers given shape by wishful thinking. If the traders suddenly stop believing it's healthy, millions of people lose their jobs. Maybe one day they'll stop believing in it altogether; they'll collectively blink and rub their eyes, and the entire global economy will vanish, like a monster under the bed that turns out never to have existed in the first place, or an optical illusion you've suddenly seen through. And on News at Ten that night they'll say, "Business news now ... and, er, there is no business news. It's gone." At which point we'd better come up with some kind of replacement barter system, pronto. Let's hope it's not based on sexual favours, or a simple trip to the supermarket's going to be downright harrowing.

In order to maintain their mad conviction that the economy is real, City traders adopt all manner of belief-bolstering strategies, such as awarding themselves vast bonuses when they "do well" in the "stock market". This reinforces the notion that it's possible to play the market with a modicum of skill, which it isn't, because a) it isn't there in the first place and b) it's random. They're like pub gamblers convincing themselves they've developed a "system" for beating the fruit machine, except they get paid in Ferraris rather than tokens.

In his excellent book Irrationality, the late Stuart Sutherland cited several surveys in which the advice of financial experts has consistently been proven to be markedly less reliable than random guesswork. Professor of psychology Len Wiseman went one further in his book Quirkology, conducting an experiment in which a professional investment analyst, a financial astrologist and a four-year-old girl all chose stocks to invest in. The four-year-old couldn't even read, so her choices were made by writing the names of 100 stocks on pieces of paper, throwing them in the air and grabbing a few off the floor. No prizes for guessing who consistently came out on top, by an impressive margin, even when the value of the stocks was tracked for a full year.

In other words, the French rogue trader is only really guilty of dreaming that little bit harder than everyone else. Rather than punish him, perhaps they should simply wish him out of existence. After all, it's been done before: a Chinese metals trader called Liu Qibing racked up immense losses in 2005 by betting the wrong way on the price of copper at the London Metal Exchange. In the immediate aftermath, despite fellow traders claiming to know him as China's main copper trader, the Chinese State Reserve Bureau simply denied he'd ever existed in the first place.

· Last week's piece on remote controls and technofear prompted a healthy response: it's heartening to discover I'm not the only one who becomes enraged when people insist on watching TV in the wrong aspect ratio. Many of you recounted tales illustrating just how exasperating it can be to cajole a reluctant technophobe to operate a computer, which reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine: he was sitting at work, when his mum rang up out of the blue.

"It's your father," she said. "He's had an accident."

My friend froze, steeled himself for the worst, and asked what had happened.

"Well, he's deleted the printer icon from the desktop ... and wants to know if there's any way of making it come back again."

· This week Charlie woke up to discover his tongue had turned black: "For two days I put off looking it up on the net, knowing it'd only convince me I was dying. A friend said it sounded serious. I begged her not to look it up either, but she did, and it turned out to be a well-known, harmless side-effect of eating chewable Pepto-Bismol indigestion pills. So the internet isn't all bad."