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Rogue Trader

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About this listen

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.

©2018 Nick Leeson (P)2018 Audible, Ltd Banks & Banking Business Professionals & Academics True Crime White Collar & Corporate Crime Crime Banking

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Having lived through the news stories of this in my younger days, and recently watched Nick Leeson on Big Brother, I was looking forwards to hearing about the after effects, his time in prison and how he put his life back together. Big problem, the book stop just as he is arrested. Obviously leaving enough to tell for a second book which is a bit annoying really.

The book is ok, but far to much technical financial language that I understood about 10% of!

Only half the story

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Disliked narration. The false female voices sounded childish and ruined this for me. Otherwise great story.

Great story

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I was directed to this book by a podcast that had referenced it and decided that it sounded interesting. It finished a bit abruptly, but was an engaging listen.

Cliff hanger

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Pretty easy book to listen to and explained the techniques Leeson used in his deception / fraud in a way that non-finance people can understand (to a certain extent).
Amazing how we managed to get away with it. The ultimate gambler who lost other peoples money.

Enjoyable listen

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Leeson ,gambled recklessly. He went chasing his losses. Not the best strategy for a trader.

Leeson

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It's an amazing story, well written and superbly narrated...I could not stop listening! I am French and had absolutely no difficulties in listening and understanding this incredible take.

Could not stop listening!

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Made for easy listening (but I am a Finance person so understood all of the jargon). Easy to get caught up in that and not understand the broader picture, which was the more interesting part of the story. Pity it stops where it does - feels like there’s more to tell.

Easy Listen for a Finance Person

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not quite as good as a Tom Clancy novel or as tasty as fruit pastels

good story moderately written

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The story of how Nick Leeson destroyed Barings is almost a modern morality tale about how one lie can lead to a mountain of lies: and hearing how he managed over months to dig himself, and his company in deeper and deeper is like watching a spectacular slow-motion car-crash. Leeson comes over as a man who wasn't even greedy, just trapped by his own risk-taking personality and fear of owning up. And who was aided and abetted by a jaw-droppingly gullible and slack senior management team who never checked up on him, never questioned his increasingly absurd stories, and never stopped advancing him more and more money. Barings sounds like it was run more like a private social-club than a global financial enterprise.

Leeson shows a good deal of sympathy for himself, which may annoy some readers. But he's also very frank about his own failings and the scale of the damage he managed to do as a result of his crazy gambling to try and extract himself from a hole that he kept sinking deeper and deeper into. It's also worth noting that the initial catalyst for his descent was an attempt to protect a junior employee from getting sacked for an error, not to make himself rich.

The narrator is competent, and the story itself is well told: even if Leeson sometimes goes off on a few too many tangents about his personal life and his nights out with the lads.

Intriguing account of a extraordinary event.

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This was part a story of a young man striving to save face, save his friends, make money, and dig himself out of a never ending pit of doom, as if was about everything we have ever been taught to despise about the banking industry.

I couldn’t “enjoy” it (it wasn’t an enjoyable story), but the intrigue, characters, what’s-going-to-happen-rollercoaster was epic.

A read for anyone.

Worth anyone reading about the biggest tale of hubris ever

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