I think calling him Norway's "richest" or "most successful"...or even suggesting he's a good trader are a bit far fetched. Losing 150%-ish when a single trade goes against you is just really bad risk management. Doesn't matter how fast you can spin up an account when you can lose 150%--just a bad trader.
(Norwegian) Trader blows €100m hole in Nasdaq’s Nordic power market
- Thread starter Laissez Faire
- Start date
anyone know how he was able to just leave his prior firm and trade with "$30k of his own money"? i thought the electricity markets required institutional-level funding to get access?
Doubt it's that complicated, electricity derivatives are available to non-professionals on the Swedish (Nasdaq) stock exchange. That guy was probably trading the underlying derivatives of those. Up to ESMA around 250x leverage was offered on some products, e.g. minilong/minishort warrants on the OMXS30 stock index; haven't checked if this has changed.
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thanks, is there a webpage for those? i wonder if they're available to US citizens.
would be interested to look at a price chart of the electricity futures though, the FT article mentions something about power spreads widening to 17x normal levels, and he was doing a convergence trade. i wonder if he was a mean reversion kind of guy, and whether his rise to fortune had to do with his choice of market - ie. with electricity markets supposedly having occasional price/volatility spurts before reverting to normal levels
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Looked around a bit. Seems electricity products are just 4-5x leverage.
The info I found was in Swedish, an example translate.google link that seemed to work:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https://www.handelsbanken.se/p125/atla/warrantsSE/prospectus/BULLELX4H.pdf&edit-text=&act=url
The underlying for one of them is the NELQ future but then again I can't find it here: https://business.nasdaq.com/trade/commodities/index.html
As for whether you can trade as a US citizen, all bets are off. Sweden's largest broker seems to assume Swedish clients. I suspect that by becoming a customer of one of the large Swedish banks, e.g. Handelsbanken or SEB you might be able to do so, but these have comparatively crap platforms.
Anyway, I went from a Swedish broker to a CFD platform because its simple trade application is still better than Swedish brokers stuck in the past century, lol.
Maybe IB provides these products? Haven't checked for futures. They seem to have a fair coverage of Swedish stocks anyway.
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Go big and lose home??
Shades of Livermore...
found the 2 year price chart for German power futures on ICE & the market seemed really 1 way, going from mid 20s to 60 euros per megawatt
https://www.theice.com/products/576...ial-Base-Futures/data?marketId=5362196&span=3
haha, are you from Sweden? any other Scandinavian trader stories to share?
Between 2005-2014 he's had an income of approximately 266 million USD and since he went out on his own he's single handedly been one of the largest personal tax payers in the country. This isn't 'far fetched', it's a fact.
There's very little information about his trading operations or even pictures of him as he shuns publicity and never gives interviews or comments. It is however known that he took a massive position in the stock market also and basically bought the lows after the financial crisis.
There we can agree.
It does however seems like he's been the victim of an extreme market movement and most likely an absence of liquidity making it impossible to exit his poisitions. Maybe we'll learn more of this eventually.
Regardless, it probably goes without saying that he's been overleveraged.