Never Hide Your Mistake, Enlarge The Circle

　　Hiding a mistake that you have made is probably one of the cardinal sins in the business. A simple trading error that is left unattended may snowball to huge losses if the market moves against the open position. It is a business requirement that any mistake made must be reported to one’s supervising manager as well as the compliance officer for remedial action to be carried out. Anyone from the financial industry with a few years of experience would be able to recall incidences of losses caused by trading errors. There were some infamous cases of deliberate cover-up on trading losses that eventually blew up and brought down the entire business unit or the entire firm. For example, the futures unit of Barings in Singapore headed by rouge trader Nick Leeson, created false customers?accounts to conceal trading losses on the Nikkei 225 index futures. When further huge losses were incurred during the collapse of the Japanese’s stock markets due to the earthquake in Kobe, Leeson resorted to falsifying documents to mobilize funds from its parent company in order to meet margin calls. Eventually, when the frauds came to light, Nick Leeson was charged and sentenced to jail. The acts of a reckless and dishonest employee finally caused the demise of Barings bank, one of the oldest and venerable banks of U.K. Another case in point is the New York branch of Daiwa Bank. Toshihide Iguchi, then the executive vice president and head of custody department of Daiwa Bank, New York branch, misapplied bank funds and falsified the books and records to conceal USD 1.1 billion dollar of losses. These were resulted from trading in United States treasury bonds at the New York branch over an 11-year period. The fraud was discovered in July 1995 and resulted in criminal indictment against the New York branch and finally its closure.