The Beauty Of Wall St: One Rogue Trader Can Still Move A Market

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 6:55AM EDT · Published Jul 2, 6:34PM EDT

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The notion of regulating risk and behavior on Wall St. was given another stunning blow today as the FT reported that one rogue broker cause a spike in oil prices earlier this week. The paper wrote “PVM Oil Associates, the world’s largest over-the-counter oil brokerage, said it had been the victim of unauthorised trading”.

Oil inexplicably jumped from $71 to $73.50 in one hour of trading on Tuesday.

The news makes it clear that even a small firm can move markets and that providing rules and watchdogs has severe limitations.

The core of much of the analysis and new regulation of the market is based on the belief that proper analysis and oversight of derivatives including mortgage-backed securities would have changed the course of the collapse of the credit markets. Better regulation and more careful monitoring would have prevented the Madoff fraud from lasting as long as it did.

The markets remain far too large and far too complex to be completely controlled by government intervention. There is always one greedy or unstable broker sitting at a desk ready to hit the “trade” button on his Bloomberg terminal.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.