I was working at UBS (before it got taken over by SBC Warburg) in the early nineties. I did 2 stints there for 1 team - I finally ended up doing 4 stints there and a 5th at the 'new' UBS.
Anyway - in the 2 stint case it was a RAD developer for money market traders. Part of the RAIDER suite. We always liked to hand feed our traders. By far the biggest book was the USD book which was run by the head off desk - one of those traders who made loads of money, never get upset, a lovely bloke. When he was away he let his assistants take over - which meant you had 2 teenagers running a 30bn dollar book!
On one of those days they were busy buying and selling. One assistant borrowed some money. Booked trade. But they did it on the other assistant's pc while they were getting a coffee. Alas they did not realise that one had defaulted the borrow option and one had defaulted the lend option. So they booked a lend and 30 minutes later 10m USD was sent to the counterparty.
Luckily it was a good counterparty and we got the money straight back. But it forced us to recode so that user had to select borrow or lend.
Sometimes you can help the users out way too much.
Others are not so lucky. I was contracting at CLBN Rotterdam when they bought a VAX computer for 1mUSD and financed it via Atlantic computers. Some bright spark sent them 1mUSD! THey never did see that money back.
Anyway - in the 2 stint case it was a RAD developer for money market traders. Part of the RAIDER suite. We always liked to hand feed our traders. By far the biggest book was the USD book which was run by the head off desk - one of those traders who made loads of money, never get upset, a lovely bloke. When he was away he let his assistants take over - which meant you had 2 teenagers running a 30bn dollar book!
On one of those days they were busy buying and selling. One assistant borrowed some money. Booked trade. But they did it on the other assistant's pc while they were getting a coffee. Alas they did not realise that one had defaulted the borrow option and one had defaulted the lend option. So they booked a lend and 30 minutes later 10m USD was sent to the counterparty.
Luckily it was a good counterparty and we got the money straight back. But it forced us to recode so that user had to select borrow or lend.
Sometimes you can help the users out way too much.
Others are not so lucky. I was contracting at CLBN Rotterdam when they bought a VAX computer for 1mUSD and financed it via Atlantic computers. Some bright spark sent them 1mUSD! THey never did see that money back.
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