Poll: Traders Would Commit Felony for $10 Million

From the NY Post (where else?):

Wall Street traders don’t mind committing the crime – it’s doing the time that gives them the willies.
More than half of traders questioned in a recent survey said they would trade on illegal insider information if the deal allowed them to pocket a $10 million profit – provided there was zero chance they would be caught.
If there was a 10 percent chance of getting cuffed by the Feds and perp-walked, then the percentage of traders willing to break the law drops from 58 percent to 28 percent. Only 7 percent of an obviously prison-averse trader community said they would do the crime if there were a 50 percent chance of an indictment. (Yep, traders know how to play odds – Eddy)
The survey, which polled 2,500 traders, was taken by Trader Monthly magazine.
Ty Wenger, the editor of the magazine, attributed the high number of traders willing to commit a felony to the huge premium placed on their having an edge. “That edge is the difference between being highly successful or going belly up; there is no guaranteed money,” Wenger said. “Morality can’t be a big part of the job.”
Perhaps it is no surprise then that the do-the-crime-but-do-no-time traders said that the public figure they despise the most is Governor Eliot Spitzer.
Spitzer is the former state Attorney General who made his mark during eight years in office by cracking down on Wall Street – specifically investment banks, mutual funds and insurance companies.
Sixty-two percent of traders in the survey cited Spitzer as being the most hated, far ahead of ex-New York Stock Exchange boss Dick Grasso, who finished second at 20 percent. John Thain, Grasso’s successor, garnered 11 percent with Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, getting 7 percent.
And speaking of Grasso, traders are just about evenly split over whether or not he got a bad rap with the Spitzer suit, claiming he was overpaid – 52 percent think he earned every penny.
“Grasso got a bad rap,” one trader, Andre Duncan of Mercer Capital, told the magazine. “People that short deserve all the money they can get.” Duncan trades short-term equities.
While we’re talking about money, 21 percent of traders questioned said they didn’t donate any of their salary to charity.
Other topics addressed by the survey, which will appear in the monthly’s next issue, to hit the stands Aug. 29:
* If you could swap lives for a year with one of the following traders, he would be . . .? Stevie Cohen, 42 percent; T. Boone Pickens, 27 percent; Paul Tudor Jones, 25 percent; and James Simons, 6 percent.
* If you could have one super power that you could use to trade, it would be . . .? Mind reading, so I could out-think everyone on the trading floor, 68 percent; Invisibility, so I could go around screwing other traders, like Patrick Swayze did in “Ghost,” 19 percent; and superhuman speed, so I could click my mouse faster, 13 percent.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on August 20th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

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