http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/busted/Content?oid=891725 "Darrell Zimmerman can't seem to distance himself from the Chicago Board of Trade. It was the institution that lured him to Chicago more than a decade ago. It was temptations within that eventually drove him away. And now it looms outside the window of his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. On October 22, 1992, Zimmerman tried to corner the world's largest securities market. For 15 minutes, with only a bad check for $50,000 in his trading account, Zimmerman controlled the market in U.S. Treasury bonds by accumulating more than three billion dollars' worth of futures contracts........"
It's funny how the US never has rogue traders. They are always Canadian - Zimmerman, Hunter, from the Uk - Leeson, or French - Kerviel.... Japanese - Sumitomo guy, or German - Metallgeshaffe group Please let me know if their has ever been a rogue trader in the US.
Great stuff! love this quote "Here in Chicago the dream is called the "O'Hare Spread": the idea is to trade into an insanely large position and head for the airport. At the end of the day if the position makes money, you head to Hawaii; if it loses, you're off to South America" and this one "Zimmerman says. "I started to buy in a hundred here and a thousand there. It was pandemonium all over....People were coming up to me and saying 'Excuse me, sir, who are you doing these trades for?' and all this shit, people who saw me on the floor for two years and never fucking gave me the time of day. I thought then 'I'm a multimillionaire. I control the market now. How many times is that going to happen in your life?' I started selling again to bury everyone." In all, Zimmerman controlled 36,000 contracts, leveraging $3.6 billion in bonds."
Anyone has idea about that fake gold trading firm within story, I had a very faded memory about a story of that firm, but can't remember its exact name.
No, it was gold (future or spot), it wasn't main stream story at that time, only people close to commodities trade have heard it.
Thanks for the post! This was a story about Zimmerman, but many of us, at least myself is explained in the very last paragraph. "The funny thing," he says, "is that no one I know said, 'Darrell, you're an asshole.' They all say, 'Why the hell couldn't you tell me you were going to do that, so I could have done at least a five lot?'"