How To Lose $7.2B With Just a Few Basic Skills

Cityslacker recommends a Register piece speculating on how a lowly trader at the French bank SocGen was able to lose billions using only Excel VB. The author freely admits that his story is not based on hard sources, but his experience in the banking industry lends plausibility.

it must be microsofts fault!

[Richard.g.k]

The solution is clearly to blame microsoft for it.

lemme try

[gEvil (beta)]

Give me $7.2B and I'll conveniently "lose" it for you. And I have no skills!

Easy!

[arcite]

Buy high, sell low!

Our president lost trillions...

[Anonymous Coward]

and he also has no skilz.

Cost of Iraq war [nationalpriorities.org]

Re:it must be microsofts fault!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you think they get the 44.6 bilion to buy yahoo? By selling Vistas? AHHAHAHAahahah.

Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me $7.2B and I'll conveniently "lose" it for you. And I have no skills!

Isn't that how Red Hat started?

The code used

[Malevolent Tester]

10 STEAL Money
20 GOTO 10

Re:Reliable?

[Anonymous Coward]

... responds the anonymous coward.

Re:Reliable?

[MrNemesis]

D'oh! Reading the wrong damned thread! We need an article about multitasking making you stupid.

Re:Insider knowledge

[sskagent]

...employ creative accounting.
Is that where they draw little faces out of the 0's and make 8's into eyes??

Re:they admit currency trading is gambling

[QuickFox]

Either way, the house/broker always wins and it's a net loss for the players.

But of course. That's why they're called brokers. They make people go broke.

Re:Easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better... Put all your money in the sandwich-heavy portfolio!

Re:The code used

[HeavensFire]

*break* *break* *break*
*break* *break* *break*

*pulls power cord*

Startanairline

[ShakaUVM]

According to Richard Branson, the best way to become a millionaire is to start as a billionaire and found an airline.

How to make a small fortune.

[JonTurner]

Q: Want to know how to make a small fortune in the stock market?
A: Start with a large fortune.

thankyouverymuch. Don't forget to tip the waiter. No stock tips, please.

Re:Huh?

[cleatsupkeep]

So here is how I understand it. He modified the system so that when a transaction used fractions of a cent, it truncated it and put the fractions of a cent into a new account he had made. However, he must have missed a decimal point, because when he checked the next day, he had 7.2 billion dollars. He lost it by writing a check and putting it under his bosses door when the office was closed.

Could Easily Do This

[c_woolley]

How to lose this kind of money is SIMPLE! Get married.

Re:it must be microsofts fault!

[sempernoctis]

Do you really want to throw away $7,200,000,000?

          <OK> <Cancel>

Re:a common preception

[jellomizer]

Dag Nabbit, I haven't upgraded my News Database for Y2k complience and things have never been better. Stock prices are dirt cheap and just going up. Although I am worried about world news just today "King Carlos & Crown Prince Assassinated"

Re:it must be microsofts fault!

[fm6]

And there's good reason to do so! VBA still doesn't have a binary-coded decimal data type. So people use binary floating point to handle currency values. Do enough transactions, and you can easily misplace $7.2B through rounding errors!

Re:Beyond trusting sources, don't trust the author

[Niko.]

...and the wine! Don't forget the wine!