Quote from DAS Trader:
Ok file this one under WTF. According to MSNBC:
Disturbing new research about financial traders and their personalities may shed some light on the behavior of Kweku Adoboli, the so-called ârogueâ UBS trader who allegedly lost the bank $2.3 billion through unauthorized trading.
A new study from a Swiss university finds that financial traders are more uncooperative than psychopaths and that they have a greater tendency for lying and risk-taking.
As part of their executive MBA thesis at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, forensic psychiatrist Thomas Noll, a chief administrator at the Pöschwies prison near Zurich, and co-author Pascal Scherrer studied the behavior of 28 financial traders in a decision-making game, comparing their performances with those of people who were diagnosed as psychopaths.
They expected to find that, like the psychopaths, the traders would be uncooperative with others, but that theyâd perform better at the game because, as Noll said, traders âare supposed to be good at making money. In social interactions, theyâre supposed to be good at performing.â
But the two authors were shocked to discover that the traders were actually more uncooperative and egocentric than psychopaths when playing a prisonerâs dilemma game -- a type of gaming scenario where participants can choose to cooperate or betray each other.
Moreover, even though the traders lied and took risks more than their psychopathic counterparts, their performance at the game was about the same as the control group. This means the traders not only didnât play well with others, they also didnât do any better at the game than regular Joes.
http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_ne...ess-than-psychopaths-study-shows?ocid=twitter

Quote from jem:
This is the rub.
Traders at banks like are frequently seen portraying themselves as the best and brightest.
However, many of us have seen them trading their own money. They seem to blow up bigger and more quickly than the average joe.
so we have always been skeptical of giving them any credit as traders.
I have also dealt with wall street bankers in the mergers and acquisition side of things. I never met a wall street banker with real integrity. They will lie in the most complicated manner, but they will lie.
Finally, I grew up in Greenwich... I knew some top individual traders and hedge fund guys. The guys that made real money had integrity and honor.
So my view is that integrity and honor indicate someone who has self cleared. And that part of being able to trade your own money properly is the ability to be honest with yourself.
I therefore conclude most wall street bankers could not trade their own money for a living.
Quote from denner:
It's obviously the institutional level guys that are employed in the TBTF universe that are under the most scrutiny. How many examples have we seen of these guys who can basically bring down an entire bank with their sociopathology.