November 5, 2017
“Hayes was so open about, and preoccupied with, his strategy that he would change the status on his Facebook page to reflect his daily desires for Libor to move up or down, a self-deprecating poke at his nerdy fixation. At night, he dreamed of the rate. When it didn’t move in a favourable direction, Hayes often lost his composure, ranting to Alykulov that he didn’t understand why rival traders didn’t accede to his and his brokers’ requests.”
November 5, 2017
“And so Hayes decided to get his younger stepbrother, Peter O’Leary, involved. O’Leary had come into Hayes’s life when Hayes was eleven years old and his mother remarried. O’Leary and his brother, Ben, moved in with Hayes and his younger brother, Robin. Hayes liked his new stepfather, Tim, and got along well with Peter and Ben. Now Peter was looking to follow in Hayes’s professional footsteps.”
November 5, 2017
“The next day, Hayes sent O’Leary a reminder, referring to Darcy as O’Leary’s “mate.”
“Will do,” O’Leary responded. “For the record he’s definitely not my ‘mate’!” O’Leary was feeling a bit sheepish about making the request. “Dunno if he’ll do anything on it seeing as he doesn’t really know me and is massively more senior than me,” he cautioned.
“Well, no harm in asking!” Hayes typed.
O’Leary banged out a quick instant message to his colleague. “high 6m yen libor owuld be gd according to my brother!” The reply came back: “WILL DO MY BEST.”
November 5, 2017
“Jeffrey Laydon was a computer geek turned salesman who, after attending a technical college in Milwaukee and spending five years as a consultant at Southwestern Bell, had moved to Florida in the mid-1980s.”
November 5, 2017
“Balding, with ruddy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, and a sandy moustache, Laydon had a couple of hobbies. One was sailing; he loved taking a boat out on Lake Monroe, where he was a member of the local sailing association. Another passion was investing. From the comfort of his home, he traded stocks, options, and futures via an online brokerage account. He was doing well enough that he toyed with the idea of quitting his job and becoming a full-time day trader, someone who could even help educate other wannabe investors.”
November 5, 2017
“By 2006, Laydon had discovered a new area to wager on: Japanese interest rates. He didn’t know much about Japan, but derivatives linked to the yen were becoming increasingly popular after the Bank of Japan’s rate hike, and he decided to give it a go”
November 5, 2017
“n the years leading up to the financial crisis, public pension funds had been growing increasingly bold and creative in the gambles they made with their members’ money. Markets were booming, and it was hard to resist the temptation to leap for the double-digit annual returns that hedge funds and other professional money managers were attaining. ”
November 5, 2017
“Before long, the OPPRS—exactly the type of dumb-money clients that Hayes and his ilk battled for the right to do business with—was the proud owner of Japanese interest-rate derivatives. Sure enough, the bets soured—a result, the fund would later claim, of manipulation by Hayes and his pals. A similar scenario played out in California. ”
November 5, 2017
“To survive, RP Martin had to be aggressive, going the extra mile for clients. Until 2010, Mustard resisted even having a compliance department; the basic guiding principle governing employee conduct should be common sense, he thought, not a rigid set of rules. When he finally bowed to reality and created a compliance group, he did what he could to marginalise its employees. Warning the new department’s chief not to inadvertently “destabilise” things, Mustard told him not to introduce any initiatives that would affect the brokers. The last thing Mustard needed was an intrusive internal affairs bureau causing his stars to jump to competitors.”
November 5, 2017
“Stenfors grew up in a small town in Finland near the Baltic Sea. Athletic, with high cheekbones, brown sideburns, and deep-set brown eyes, he was the unusual combination of a runner and smoker.”
November 5, 2017
“Stenfors cycled through some of the world’s biggest banks. In September 2001, he was working in London in the investment-banking division of Crédit Agricole when terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The French bank’s New York offices were on the ninety-second floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower—just below where the first plane crashed. (Sixty-nine Crédit Agricole employees perished that day.) Early that afternoon in London, footage of the disaster was broadcast on the wall-mounted TVs around Crédit Agricole’s trading floor. Stenfors and his colleagues kept doing business as if nothing had happened.”
November 5, 2017
“Stenfors and Farr were tight. Stenfors thought the broker was friendly and honest, and it felt nice to do business with an underdog firm and an up-from-his-bootstraps broker who was making a fraction of what someone at a rival firm would earn.”
November 5, 2017
“After clicking at the ICAP party, Hayes and Stenfors started trading together more and more. Hayes soon became one of Stenfors’s biggest trading partners, and they tended to automatically route their transactions through Farr, who pocketed fat commission payments for almost no work.”
November 5, 2017
“To the frustration of some of his brokers, Hayes remained uninterested in being lavishly entertained. He preferred to sit at home with a bucket of fried chicken from KFC and a tall glass of orange juice, followed by a hot bath. One evening, a desperate broker showed up outside UBS’s Tokyo office and pleaded to let him take Hayes out to dinner; the broker needed to show his bosses he was entertaining the star client. Hayes finally relented—and then led him to a nearby Burger King, where the broker spotted a rat scuttling across the floor”
November 5, 2017
“The irony was that, just as the Reads started to settle down, Hayes was thinking about returning to England. Ainsworth, after getting off to a fast start in Japan, now was entertaining a fantasy of opening a clothing shop back home. (“Independent woman,” Read remarked sarcastically. “Fantastic.”) Hayes, meanwhile, missed the food, his family, the ability to communicate relatively easily, the weather (he hated Tokyo’s hot summer days and longed for soggy England), and especially Queens Park Rangers. Maybe he could move back to London, enrol in business school, and pursue a profession less intense than trading. He gave himself at most another couple of years in Tokyo. “I will definitely need a rest,” he told Read.”
Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11
