“魔鬼交易员”不过是赌徒

One of my former bosses at Goldman Sachsused to tell me that trading was not the smartest way to build a career in finance. The real way to make money was to let other people do the trading and investing, and just be the middleman. Taking a little turn or commission from both buyers and sellers, many times a day, was the surest way of becoming rich. I did not listen – trading was my only love. Money did not interest me as much as the daily fight to be smarter than the market.

当年我在高盛(Goldman Sachs)时，一位上司常常告诉我，要想在金融领域干一番事业，从事交易工作不是最明智的方式。真正赚钱的是让其他人交易和投资，自己做个中间人就行了。一天多次地向买卖双方收取一些回报或佣金是最有把握的致富方式。我没有听他的——交易是我唯一的爱好。对我而言，每日在市场搏杀并战胜它远比赚钱有趣。

Over time, my boss became very wealthy indeed, by taking more and more turns, which grew larger and larger in size. He was not atypical of what has taken place in the City of London over the past 20 years. Banks have been robbed by their own employees year after year through bonuses. Private equity firms have stripped companies down to the bone with no respect for history or social repercussions. New, complex derivative instruments have been invented, designed to be understood by only a select few traders, and to be lapped up by the naive. The asymmetric pay-off is an affront to morals and ethics.

随着时间的推移，我的这位上司获得了越来越多的回报，日积月累下来，他果真变得非常的富有。在过去20年间的伦敦金融城里，他的情况并非个例。银行年复一年地给员工发奖金，实际上被自己的员工打劫了。私人股本公司已经将企业榨干，丝毫不顾及历史或社会反响。人们发明出新的、复杂的金融衍生品，目的是只让极少数交易员能够理解，并让天真的投资者买下来。不对称的回报违反了道德和伦理。

So when I read about the verdict handed down to Kweku Adoboli, who lost an extraordinary amount of money at UBSand was this week sentenced to seven years in jail, I was not surprised. Some people have wondered whether he can actually be blamed for the giant losses in the first place, working in an environment that must have seemed to him to be purely focused on making money at any cost, and where few people are ever fired or asked difficult questions when making large profits. To me, Adoboli comes across as a decent, hard-working person, little different from any of his colleagues. His defence seems to have been that he never wanted to hurt anyone but that his trades started going wrong and he was just trying to make the money back. Sounds genuine enough to me.

因此，当我看到奎库·阿多博利(Kweku Adoboli)的判决时，并不感到意外。阿多博利给瑞银(UBS)造成了巨大损失，结果被判处7年监禁。一些人怀疑他是否真的是巨额损失的罪魁祸首，毕竟他所处的工作环境似乎就要求他不惜代价地赚钱，也很少有人因为获得巨额盈利而被解雇或被问及难以回答的问题。我认为，阿多博利看上去是一个正派、工作努力的人，与他的同事没有什么不同。他的辩解似乎是，他从未想伤害任何人，但他的交易出了问题，他只是想要把钱赚回来。对我而言，这听起来足够真诚。

Most of the money made by banks in the City is derived from taking disproportionately large fees for advising companies and servicing investors. Being a real trader is very different: it involves trying to beat the market on a level playing field without any fee cushions, where age and qualifications don’t matter; where there is a fight between you and the market, which without a strong trading process and risk control, can never be won; and where commitment is 24/7 and sleepless nights rule your life and never stop, no matter how successful the past has been.

在伦敦金融城里，银行的大部分收入来自它们为企业提供建议、为投资者提供服务所赚取的巨额佣金。一名真正的交易员则完全不同：后者要努力在公平竞争的基础上打败市场，没有任何佣金作为缓冲。在这里年龄和资格并不重要；在这里你和市场对战，如果没有稳健的交易过程和风险控制，你永远也不可能赢得胜利；在这里是7天24小时待命，你会有无数个不眠之夜，而且永远不会停下来，无论你曾经取得多么大的成功。

Adoboli’s job was not, in the strict sense, that of a trader. He was not trained to have a trading strategy based on in-depth research into companies or market direction. He was just a tiny cog in the giant UBS machine, hired to make an almost riskless profit dealing in listed structured products – some of which UBS was later found by Finra, a US regulatory body, to have mis-sold to clients, resulting in a $1.5m fine. His job consisted mainly of mechanically hedging positions to reduce the risk of the desk, but instead of staying within his pay grade he went rogue. So when people say he was a trader who lost a lot of money when a trade went wrong, to me this seems incorrect: he was not a trader, he was a wannabe-trader-turned-gambler, trying to make up for losses by upping the stakes higher and higher.

严格意义上来说，阿多博利做的并非是交易员的工作。他没有受过相关培训，不懂得在交易中首先要对公司或市场走势进行深度研究。阿多博利只是瑞银这台庞大机器上的一颗小小的螺丝钉，受聘从事上市结构性产品的交易，目标是获得近乎无风险的盈利——后来美国金融业监管局(FINRA)发现瑞银的部分这类产品涉及违规销售，并对其处以150万美元罚款。他的工作主要是机械地对冲头寸以降低交易风险，但他没有在职权范围内操作，反而开始胡来。因此当人们说他是一个因交易出错而造成巨额损失的交易员时，我觉得这话似乎有些不妥：他不是一个交易员，他曾经想成为一名交易员，结果却沦为一名赌徒，试图通过不断加大赌注来挽回损失。

So to me, the Adoboli issue is quite simple. It is about how to judge a gambler who goes to a casino where he loses his employers’ money. Do you blame the company that was careless and defrauded and whose money was lost? Do you blame the casino? Do you blame the fraudster, the victim or the beneficiary? Adoboli clearly blamed everyone but himself, and that shows me that he was never trader material, because a true trader only blames him or herself for losing money and no one else.

因此我认为阿多博利的问题相当简单。一个去赌场把老板的钱输掉的赌徒，要怎么评判他呢？你会责备粗心大意、受到欺诈、蒙受了损失的公司吗？你会责备赌场吗？你会责备行骗者、受害者还是受益者？显然，阿多博利在怪除他以外的所有人。依我看来，他永远也成不了一名真正的交易员，因为真正的交易员亏钱时只会责备自己，而不是其他人。

His actions could produce a positive side-effect that the credit crisis did not, and that is to force investment banks to become serious about how they risk their capital – or, perhaps I should say, their shareholders’ capital.

阿多博利之事可能产生一个积极的副作用（信贷危机没有产生这种作用），那就是迫使投资银行在用它们（或许我应该说是它们股东）的资本冒险时慎重一些。

But for now, the story remains that the City is out of control and that no one ever takes real responsibility for failure any more. Pride has gone out the window and greed has taken its place. Adoboli is just another symptom of the disease.

但就目前而言，故事依然是金融城失去控制，没有人再为失败真正承担起责任。自豪之心已经无影无踪，贪婪取代了它的位置。阿多博利只是这种疾病的又一征兆。

The writer, a former trader at Goldman Sachs, runs financial education courses and is a partner at Hampstead Capital

本文作者曾在高盛任交易员，目前在经营金融培训课程，是Hampstead Capital的合伙人