Ghost Trader

A good con man chooses a mark who wants to make money, thinks he’s found an easy way, and is willing to place himself in a morally suspect position for big profit. That could be called a bank. It’s important that the mark always believes they have the upper hand.

Jerome Kerviel, rogue trader. ‘Ghost trader’ in the French parlance. 3.7 billion gambled away since December. One way to fend off the winter blues. But like Leeson, he was neither rogue nor ghost but a man seduced by the ethics of his own employer. ‘It doesn’t seem that he was able to benefit from these colossal trades and directly he did not’ – Chief-Exec of Société Genéralé, Daniel Bouton. Locked inside the vacuum-sealed ethical logic of the privatised company, Kerviel was fine while he was hedging bets and playing small. His mistake was over-ambition. He switched to playing futures. Placing spreads.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/01/24/bcnsocgen624.xml

The symbol of our market is not the troubled trader but the punter with a spread on it going down. There's something sublime about betting on the market without investing in it.

http://www.iii.co.uk/spreadbetting/

Invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails, as Joyce once described the figure of a god-like artist.