Law Commons^™

Accounting For Greed: Unraveling The “Rogue Trader” Mystery, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I analyze the motivations underlying the actions of "rogue traders" - market professionals who engage in unauthorized purchases or sales of securities, commodities or derivatives, often for a financial institution's proprietary trading account - and the motivations of the managers or supervisors who are assigned to oversee such traders. After beginning with the observation that rogue trading incidents are neither new nor isolated events, I argue that the continued existence of pervasive rogue trading has remained a mystery for industry observers, particularly given both the extensive legal regime and formal institutional policies apparently designed to curb such …