Product Description

Pressure, pace, error: ROGUE TRADER grippingly tells the inside story of how the greatest gamble ever made rocked the City of London to its foundations. Crackling with tension, in a narrative as crisp as any thriller, Nick Leeson's autobiographical account reveals how he 'lost' £800 millions as General Manager of Baring Futures Singapore through foolhardy speculations on behalf of his employer, Barings Brothers - the world's first merchant bank. As Leeson's audacity escalated, so did his losses while London continued to pour money down the drain. ROGUE TRADER is a dazzlingly revealing story of a man shaped by events that proved beyond his control.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4350 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 378 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
When Nick Leeson was arrested in 1995 for bringing Barings Bank to its proverbial knees, it initially seemed as if he had single handedly crushed this most well-established and well-respected financial institution, and indeed it was he alone who found himself in a Singapore jail serving time for deceiving the auditors of Barings in a way "likely to cause harm to their reputation" and to cheating SIMEX (Singapore International Money Exchange). In Rogue Trader Leeson tells his own story with more than a hint of the bitterness--and, at times, suspended belief--of an ordinary Joe from Watford made scapegoat by a cast of characters who may not have been guilty by design, but certainly appear to be guilty of simply not adhering to the basic procedures which would have picked up any discrepancies long before any real damage was done. Hard to feel sorry for such wheeler- dealers, perhaps, and certainly hard to feel sorry for Leeson, but he manages to successfully tell an incredible story which moves at breakneck speed from his appointment as General Manager for Barings in Singapore to his fast and furious downfall, which began as a simple cover-up of a mistake by an inexperienced member of staff and ended in multi-million pound fraud, with earth-shattering repercussions across the financial markets of the world. Anyone who ever wondered how one man could do so much damage will find the explanation between the pages of Rogue Trader, but more than that they will also find a hugely compelling, tense and decidedly hair- raising story that defies imagination to the point where, if it had been written as fiction no one would ever believe it. --Susan Harrison

OBSERVER
* "Hairraising...as revealing a document about contemporary Britain as all 2,000 pages of the Scott Report"

FINANCIAL TIMES
* "Simultaneously entertaining and appalling"

Customer Reviews

Compulsive account of how Leeson brought down Barings Bank
There's always something compelling about reading someone's account of getting themselves deeper and deeper into mortal trouble. Then add the racy dark humour that is peppered throughout the book as Nick Leeson looks back on his futile attempts to rectify his increasingly desperate trading situation, whilst those around him are oblivious to the impending disaster. The narrative cleverly reveals just enough detail to vividly depict the general atmosphere of things without being bogged down in flowery descriptions, helping to maintain a good pace.

This is a classic story of a classic dilemma - what to do if you (or someone you are responsible for) makes a serious mistake. Do you face the immediate consequences and come clean with those affected by the mistake, or do you work around it and try and remedy the mistake before anyone finds out, whilst risking making things even worse? Whatever the morals of the decisions Nick made in response to such a dilemma, one just can't help but empathise and be swept up in his predicament.

The fact that it all happened for real makes this book so much more gripping than some trashy corporate thriller. You are likely to finish it within days, if not in a single sitting as I did. And read it again only a few months later.

Extraordinary
The extraordinary tale of how one man brought Britain's oldest bank to the point of collapse, without any of his superiors even being aware of the situation. This is a first hand account of how Leeson got away with something which escalated completely out of control. The really shocking part is the sheer level of incompetence of almost everyone else in the organisation at the time.

Bank Gambling Without Limit
Nick Leeson seems to have been a chap without much formal education (even by today's piss-poor standards), no huge curiosity about the world, but some cunning and a lot of facility for mental arithmetic. Deriving from the outer London commuter suburb of Watford, he somehow became head of a small team of traders doing --to most-- incomprehensible things on computer screen that can make people a lot of money. Thus, he became (cf. Bonfire of the Vanities; Wall Street) a "master of the universe", able to "moon" without embarrassment in a bar (though not without pain, in Singapore, which enforces the standards Watford now does not, sadly).

This book exposes many things: how right they are in Russia to call money "the element that makes stupidity shine" and don't the British and Americans respect those who have it! Or can make it, Or who can pretend to be able to make it...

Leeson garners a lot of sympathy for himself, really. For my money the villains are the same sort of idiots who are STILL in charge of the law firms, City banks, racecourses and other institutions in the UK: in this case, from Peter Baring (Chairman because his great-great-etc grandad was...and intellect not required, so long as the port is passed properly), to the greedy execs and managers at Barings (there through pushiness not intellectual horsepower, very often) who talk of "shedloads of money" and the like; and of course the whole madness of a system where people can make money by pushing buttons and young men (whether ex-Oxbridge or ex-Watford) can make bonuses of millions by luck and finger-facility and not a lot more. Wake up, City, if it looks too good to be true, it usually is! Remember 1987, the housing collapse, the dot.com bubble.......