Drunken online trader gets fired and fined

FORMER COMMODITIES TRADER Steven Noel Perkins was fined £72, 000 for market abuse by the Financial Standards Authority (FSA).

Perkins used his laptop to buy over 7 million barrels of Brent oil during a binge drinking session one early morning in 2009. The FSA also banned Perkins for five years while the rogue trader deals with his alcohol abuse problem.

"He has been banned because he is not a fit and proper person to be involved in regulated activities and his behaviour posed a risk to the proper functioning of the market," said Alexander Justham, director of markets at the FSA.

Most people have woken up from an alcohol induced blackout and wondered what happened the night before. Few can claim that their drunken idiocy led to an increase in the price of a barrel of oil and a £6 million loss for their firm.

Perkins, of Essex, and his late night trading antics bring to mind another instance where irresponsible, unauthorised and speculative trading by one Nick Leeson actually collapsed Barings Bank.

Both of them, however, are really very small fry compared to the astronomically leveraged, speculative gambling on Wall Street and in the City of London that almost blew up the world's economy. Those old boys must all have gone to the right schools, however, because they got the governments to bail them out and none of them were banned or fined, were they. µ