It’s probably not uncommon for City traders to wonder how they burnt so much cash during a drunken night on the town.
But Steve Perkins was left with a bigger black hole in his memory than most when his employer rang one morning to ask what he’d done with $520m of the oil trading firm’s money.
It was 7.45am on June 30 last year when the senior, longstanding broker for PVM Oil Futures was contacted by an admin clerk querying why he’d bought 7m barrels of crude in the middle of the night.
The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades.
By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.
By the time PVM realised the trades were not authorised and swiftly began to unwind the positions, losses of exactly $9,763,252 had stacked up.
As a broker, Mr Perkins was only allowed to place trades on behalf of his clients – not using any of PVM’s own money. And records show that he placed a legitimate order for a client at 1.34pm through his broking desk by telephone. This was quickly followed by seven more orders with a value of $8m using PVM’s cash.
Mr Perkins’ trading stopped for a few hours, but in the early hours of the morning, he returned to the oil market via his laptop. He placed an incredible $520m in orders through ICE Futures Europe, where traders can buy or sell crude oil for future delivery and bet on whether prices will go up or down. The first trade was at 1.22am was at $71.40 per barrel and the last trade at 3.41am was at $73.05. During this period, Mr Perkins gradually edged up the price by bidding higher each time, until he was responsible for 69pc of the global market volume.
Having admitted to an alcohol problem and received treatment, Mr Perkins was banned from trading for five years and hit with a £72,000 fine, reduced from £150,000 because of potential financial hardship.
Mr Perkins was not available for comment last night at his £340,000 home in Brentwood, Essex, and it is not known whether he has found alternative employment. The FSA will consider re-approving him as a broker after the ban, if he has recovered from his alcohol problem, but noted “Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk”. It added that there appeared to have been “no motive” for buying up the oil.
The investigation also shows that he was able to trade huge volumes with very little cash up front and no position limit, exposing how it easy it was for a single British broker on a bender to cause chaos in the oil market.-from the Telegraph
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