What do you do with the drunken trader? Post: 302433829

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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

06-30-2010

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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.

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mdbfontset

mdbFontset(5)							 The m17n Library						     mdbFontset(5)

NAME

       mdbFontset - Fontset

DESCRIPTION

       The m17n library loads a fontset definition from the m17n database by the tags <fontset, FONTSET-NAME>. The plist format of the data is as
       follows:

       FONTSET ::= PER-SCRIPT * PER-CHARSET * FALLBACK *

       PER-SCRIPT ::= '(' SCRIPT PER-LANGUAGE + ')'

       PER-LANGUAGE ::= '(' LANGUAGE FONT-SPEC-ELEMENT + ')'

       PER-CHARSET ::= '(' CHARSET FONT-SPEC-ELEMENT + ')'

       FALLBACK ::= FONT-SPEC-ELEMENT

       FONT-SPEC-ELEMENT ::= '(' FONT-SPEC [ FLT-NAME ] ')'

       FONT-SPEC ::=
	    '(' [ FOUNDRY FAMILY
		  [ WEIGHT [ STYLE [ STRETCH [ ADSTYLE ]]]]]
		REGISTRY
	     [ OTF-SPEC ] [ LANG-SPEC ] ')'

       SCRIPT is a symbol of script name (e.g. latin, han) or nil. LANGUAGE is a two-letter symbol of language name code defined by ISO 639 (e.g.
       ja, zh) or nil.

       FONT-SPEC is to specify properties of a font. FOUNDRY to REGISTRY are symbols corresponding to Mfoundry to Mregistry property of a font.
       See m17nFont for the meaning of each property.

       OTF-SPEC is a symbol specifyng the required OTF features. The symbol name has the following syntax.

	 OTF-SPEC-NAME ::= ':otf=' SCRIPT LANGSYS ? GSUB-FEATURES ? GPOS-FEATURES ?

	 SCRIPT ::= SYMBOL
	 LANGSYS ::= '/' SYMBOL

	 GSUB-FEATURES ::= '=' FEATURE-LIST ?

	 GPOS-FEATURES ::= '+' FEATURE-LIST ?

	 FEATURE-LIST ::= '~' ? FEATURE ( ',' '~' ? FEATURE ',' )

       Here, FEATURE is a four-letter Open Type feature.

       LANG-SPEC is a symbol specifying the required language support. The symbol name has the following syntax.

	 LANG-SPEC-NAME ::= ':lang=' LANG

       Here, LANG is a two or three-letter ISO-639 language code.

       FLT-NAME is a name of Font Layout Table (Font Layout Table).

EXAMPLE

       This is an example of PER_SCRIPT.

       (han
	 (ja
	   ((jisx0208.1983-0)))
	 (zh
	   ((gb2312.1980-0)))
	 (nil
	   ((big5-0))))

       It instructs the font selector to use a font of registry 'jisx0208.1983-0' for a 'han' character (i.e. a character whose Mscript property
       is 'han') if the character has Mlanguage text property 'ja' in an M-text and the character is in the repertories of such fonts. Otherwise,
       try a font of registry 'gb2312.1980-0' or 'big5-0'. If that 'han' character does not have Mlanguage text property, try all three fonts.

       See the function mdraw_text() for the detail of how a font is selected.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2001 Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA)
       Copyright (C) 2001-2011 National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
       Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
       <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html>.

Version 1.6.2							    12 Jan 2011 						     mdbFontset(5)