Friday, January 25, 2008

nice to see "plain vanilla" getting so much use



A Spiral of Losses by a ‘Plain Vanilla’ Trader

By Nelson D Scwartz Published: January 25, 2008


PARIS
— On the elite trading floors here, where France’s brightest minds devise some of the most complex instruments in global finance, few people noticed Jérôme Kerviel.

He was lucky to be there at all. Many of his colleagues had been plucked from the prestigious Grandes Ecoles — the Harvards and
M.I.T.’s of France — and wielded advanced degrees in math or engineering. Mr. Kerviel arrived from business school and started out shuffling paper in the back office....