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Special Forums News, Links, Events and Announcements Complex Event Processing RSS News What do you do with the drunken trader? Post 302433829 by Linux Bot on Wednesday 30th of June 2010 04:00:01 PM
Old 06-30-2010
What do you do with the drunken trader?

John Bates
06-30-2010 03:59 PM
The news that Steven Perkins, (former) oil futures broker in the London office of PVM Oil Futures, has been fined 72,000 pounds ($108,400) by the FSA and banned from working in the industry is no surprise, see article here:

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7862246/How-a-broker-spent-520m-in-a-drunken-stupor-and-moved-the-global-oil-price.html.

 

It could have been worse given that the broker, after a few days of heavy drinking, took on a 7.0 million barrel long position on crude oil in the middle of the night. The fine seems miniscule since it cost PVM somewhere in the vicinity of $10 million - after unwinding the $500+ million position.

 

The surprising thing about this incident is that it happened at all. Perkins was a broker, not a trader. He acted on behalf of traders, placing orders on the Intercontinental Exchange among other places. That he could go into the trading system and sneak through 7.0 million barrels without a customer on the other side is unbelievable.

 

Heavy drinking is practically a job requirement in the oil industry, my sources tell me, so this kind of thing could be a real issue going forward. As algorithmic trading takes hold in the energy markets, trading may approach the ultra high speeds seen in equities markets.  This is a recipe for super high speed disaster, unless there are proper controls in place - especially if there were a way for the broker or trader in question to enrich himself in the process.

 

One powerful way to prevent this kind of accident or fraud is through the use of stringent pre-trade risk controls. The benefits of being able to pro-actively monitor trades include catching "fat fingered" errors, preventing trading limits from being breached, and even warning brokers and regulators of potential fraud - all of which cost brokers, traders and regulators money. PVM is a good example of this.

 

Ultra-low-latency pre-trade risk management can be achieved by brokers without compromising speed of access.  One solution is a low latency "risk firewall" utilizing complex event processing as its core, which can be benchmarked in the low microseconds.  Errors can be caught in real-time, before they can reach the exchange. Heaving that drunken trader right overboard, and his trades into the bin.

 



Source...
 
merge_fonts(3alleg4)						  Allegro manual					      merge_fonts(3alleg4)

NAME
merge_fonts - Merges two fonts into one font. Allegro game programming library. SYNOPSIS
#include <allegro.h> FONT *merge_fonts(FONT *f1, FONT *f2) DESCRIPTION
This function merges the character ranges from two fonts and returns a new font containing all characters in the old fonts. In general, you cannot merge fonts of different types (eg, TrueType fonts and bitmapped fonts), but as a special case, this function can promote a mono- chrome bitmapped font to a color font and merge those. Example: FONT *myfont; FONT *myfancy_font; FONT *lower_range; FONT *upper_range; FONT *capitals; FONT *combined_font; FONT *tempfont; ... /* Create a font that contains the capitals from */ /* the fancy font but other characters from myfont */ lower_range = extract_font_range(myfont, -1, 'A'-1); upper_range = extract_font_range(myfont, 'Z'+1, -1); capitals = extract_font_range(myfancy_font, 'A', 'Z'); tempfont = merge_fonts(lower_range, capitals); combined_font = merge_fonts(tempfont, upper_range); /* Clean up temporary fonts */ destroy_font(lower_range); destroy_font(upper_range); destroy_font(capitals); destroy_font(tempfont); RETURN VALUE
Returns a pointer to the new font or NULL on error. Remember that you are responsible for destroying the font when you are finished with it to avoid memory leaks. SEE ALSO
extract_font_range(3alleg4), is_trans_font(3alleg4), is_color_font(3alleg4), is_mono_font(3alleg4), exfont(3alleg4) Allegro version 4.4.2 merge_fonts(3alleg4)
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