Disturbing new research about financial traders and their personalities may shed some light on the behavior of Kweku Adoboli, the so-called “rogue” UBS trader who allegedly lost the bank $2.3 billion through unauthorized trading.
A new study from a Swiss university finds that financial traders are more uncooperative than psychopaths and that they have a greater tendency for lying and risk-taking.
As part of their executive MBA thesis at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, forensic psychiatrist Thomas Noll, a chief administrator at the Pöschwies prison near Zurich, and co-author Pascal Scherrer studied the behavior of 28 financial traders in a decision-making game, comparing their performances with those of people who were diagnosed as psychopaths.
They expected to find that, like the psychopaths, the traders would be uncooperative with others, but that they’d perform better at the game because, as Noll said, traders “are supposed to be good at making money. In social interactions, they’re supposed to be good at performing.”
But the two authors were shocked to discover that the traders were actually more uncooperative and egocentric than psychopaths when playing a prisoner’s dilemma game -- a type of gaming scenario where participants can choose to cooperate or betray each other.
Moreover, even though the traders lied and took risks more than their psychopathic counterparts, their performance at the game was about the same as the control group. This means the traders not only didn’t play well with others, they also didn’t do any better at the game than regular Joes.
In their master’s thesis, Noll and Scherrer write:
“The outcome seems to indicate that bank traders are even more prone than psychopathic individuals to rely on strategies that do not optimize their own total profit but considerably harm the profit of their gaming partner. Healthy controls achieved the same profit on their own part as traders and psychopaths but used a strategy that led to an equal profit of their partner and hence led to the highest overall profit, whereas the lowest overall profit was achieved by the traders.”
Interestingly, the traders scored much lower than the psychopaths did on cold-heartedness and the externalization of guilt, meaning they didn’t place the blame on other people when they failed.
Noll wanted to emphasize that while the traders may have some psychopathic traits, they’re not card-carrying psychopaths. He says companies should take a closer look at the personalities of the traders they hire (cough, cough, UBS).
“It might be helpful in the recruiting process, for instance, to keep a better eye on what the personalities of these people are like,” he said. “If this test represents reality correctly, traders are not good at . They’re just as bad as everyone else.”
With "rogue traders" all the rage, a Swiss university study found that brokers "behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test." The study's co-author Thomas Noll said, "Naturally one can't characterize the traders as deranged," but then went on to describe behavior we'd be comfortable characterizing exactly as such:
Particularly shocking for Noll was the fact that the bankers weren't aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, "it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents," Noll explained. "And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents."
Noll said it was as if the stockbrokers realized they had the same car as their neighbor, and naturally "they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves." Metaphorically!
death to capitalism, death to the financial class.
Impper posted:
seems about right?
oh, yeah, absolutely, but it's good to have some confirmation.
“It might be helpful in the recruiting process, for instance, to keep a better eye on what the personalities of these people are like,” he said
what a person does for 12 hours a day doesnt affect their mind. human nature ftw in '11!!
getfiscal posted:
Sample size 28.
Sample size: my dick up your ass.
If a study has statistically significant results, it has statistically significant results regardless. Four sample points in total can be statistically significant. It is - as all studies are - open to being overturned by later findings, but fuck off, wanker.
getfiscal posted:
traders are good at their jobs. what do you do? spend your days looking up information to legitimate pederasty or some shit? some people actually try to get shit done.
whoa! this kitten's got claws!
getfiscal posted:
Sample size one: study finds cycloneteen "dumb as shit"
A sample size of one is too small to establish statistical significance, and your sample isn't randomly selected.
getfiscal posted:
Lets take some chocolate-mongering watchmakers masters thesis as the basis of global economic policy because we're idiots
you're right, instead we should use the idiotic suppositions of a bunch of 19th century buffoons who couldn't figure out how to run an economy without constant famines.
Impper posted:
cycloneman's adherence to science is humourous to me
Science is the best source of truth out there, I can't believe you Impper. I just... can't believe you... 
Edited by Cycloneboy ()
Impper posted:
cycloneman's adherence to science is humourous to me
thats generous
Islam
- 9/11
Science:
- ended syphilis, polio, smallpox, etc.
- extended life expectancy by decades
- reduced infant and mother mortality vastly
- produced agricultural systems that could feed the whole world (if not for the current capitalist distribution scheme)
- provides survival possibilities for formerly fatal diseases, such as cancer, aids, etc.
- allows for family planning w/o resorting to homosexuality, non-piv sex or unreliable natural birth control techniques
- is the defining characteristic of the Islamic golden age
SomeIsraeliFuck posted:
what shit?
efficiently running the economy
guess i'll never have what it tkaes to get fiscal myself.
Cycloneboy posted:
let's compare, Islam and science, what have they done good for human society:
Islam
- 9/11
Science:
- ended syphilis, polio, smallpox, etc.
- extended life expectancy by decades
- reduced infant and mother mortality vastly
- produced agricultural systems that could feed the whole world (if not for the current capitalist distribution scheme)
- provides survival possibilities for formerly fatal diseases, such as cancer, aids, etc.
- allows for family planning w/o resorting to homosexuality, non-piv sex or unreliable natural birth control techniques
- is the defining characteristic of the Islamic golden age
thats ahistorical.
getfiscal posted:SomeIsraeliFuck posted:
what shit?efficiently running the economy
this is ironic, right?
babyfinland posted:Cycloneboy posted:
let's compare, Islam and science, what have they done good for human society:
Islam
- 9/11
Science:
- ended syphilis, polio, smallpox, etc.
- extended life expectancy by decades
- reduced infant and mother mortality vastly
- produced agricultural systems that could feed the whole world (if not for the current capitalist distribution scheme)
- provides survival possibilities for formerly fatal diseases, such as cancer, aids, etc.
- allows for family planning w/o resorting to homosexuality, non-piv sex or unreliable natural birth control techniques
- is the defining characteristic of the Islamic golden age
thats ahistorical.
you are
Crow posted:babyfinland posted:Cycloneboy posted:
let's compare, Islam and science, what have they done good for human society:
Islam
- 9/11
Science:
- ended syphilis, polio, smallpox, etc.
- extended life expectancy by decades
- reduced infant and mother mortality vastly
- produced agricultural systems that could feed the whole world (if not for the current capitalist distribution scheme)
- provides survival possibilities for formerly fatal diseases, such as cancer, aids, etc.
- allows for family planning w/o resorting to homosexuality, non-piv sex or unreliable natural birth control techniques
- is the defining characteristic of the Islamic golden age
thats ahistorical.
you are
im so historical right now, you dont even know
Cycloneboy posted:
Science is the best source of truth out there, I can't believe you Impper. I just... can't believe you...
However gratefully we might approach the objective spirit - and who hasn't been sick to death at least once of everything subjective, with its damned ipsissimosity! - nevertheless, in the end we even have to be cautious of our gratitude, and put an end to the exaggerated terms in which people have recently been celebrating the desubjectivization and depersonification of spirit, as if this were some sort of goal in itself, some sort of redemption or transfiguration. This kind of thing tends to happen within the pessimist school, which has reasons of its own for regarding "disinterested knowing" with the greatest respect. The objective man who no longer swears or complains like the pessimist does, the ideal scholar who expresses the scientific instinct as it finally blossoms and blooms all the way (after things have gone partly or wholly wrong a thousand times over) - he is certainly one of the most expensive tools there is: but he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we will say: he is a mirror, - he is not an "end in himself." The objective man is really a mirror: he is used to subordinating himself in front of anything that wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that of knowing, of "mirroring forth." He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself gently towards it, so that even light footsteps and the passing by of a ghostly being are not lost on his surface and skin. He has so thoroughly become a passageway and reflection of strange shapes and events, that whatever is left in him of a "person" strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often as disruptive. It takes an effort for him to think back on "himself," and he is not infrequently mistaken when he does. He easily confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his own basic needs, and this is the only respect in which he is crude and careless. Maybe his health is making him suffer, or the pettiness and provincial airs of a wife or a friend, or the lack of companions and company, - all right then, he makes himself think about his sufferings: but to no avail! His thoughts have already wandered off, towards more general issues, and by the next day he does not know how to help himself any more than he knew the day before. He has lost any serious engagement with the issue as well as the time to spend on it: he is cheerful, not for lack of needs but for lack of hands to grasp his neediness. The obliging manner in which he typically approaches things and experiences, the sunny and natural hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes at him, his type of thoughtless goodwill, of dangerous lack of concern for Yeses and Noes: oh, there are plenty of times when he has to pay for these virtues of his! - and being human, he all too easily becomes the caput mortuum (worthless residue) of these virtues. If you want him to love or hate (I mean love and hate as a god, woman, or animal would understand the terms -) he will do what he can and give what he can. But do not be surprised if it is not much, - if this is where he comes across as fake, fragile, questionable, and brittle. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and more like un tour de force, a little piece of vanity and exaggeration. He is sincere only to the extent that he is allowed to be objective: he is "nature" and "natural" only in his cheerful totality. His mirror-like soul is forever smoothing itself out; it does not know how to affirm or negate any more. He does not command; and neither does he destroy. "Je ne meprise presque rien," ("I despise almost nothing") he says with Leibniz: that presque should not be overlooked or underestimated! He is no paragon of humanity; he does not go in front of anyone or behind. In general, he puts himself at too great a distance to have any basis for choosing between good or evil. If people have mistaken him for a philosopher for so long, for a Caesar-like man who cultivates and breeds, for the brutal man of culture - then they have paid him much too high an honor and overlooked what is most essential about him, - he is a tool, a piece of slave (although, without a doubt, the most sublime type of slave) but nothing in himself, - presque rien! The objective person is a tool, an expensive measuring instrument and piece of mirror art that is easily injured and spoiled and should be honored and protected; but he is not a goal, not a departure or a fresh start, he is not the sort of complementary person in which the rest of existence justifies itself. He is not a conclusion - and still less a beginning, begetter or first cause; there is nothing tough, powerful or self-supporting that wants to dominate. Rather, he is only a gentle, brushed-off, refined, agile pot of forms, who first has to wait for some sort of content or substance in order "to shape" himself accordingly, - he is generally a man without substance or content, a "selfless" man. And consequently, in parenthesi, nothing for women. -
Cycloneboy posted:
this is ironic, right?
no. stock brokers are out there banging babes and doing cocaine and they still run this shit like it is a finely tuned machine. you sit around and whine that people these days are too hard on child molesters.
getfiscal posted:Cycloneboy posted:
this is ironic, right?no. stock brokers are out there banging babes and doing cocaine and they still run this shit like it is a finely tuned machine.
No they don't.
*points to current state of the economy*
Cycloneboy posted:
No they don't.
*points to current state of the economy*
Umm dunno which planet you're on psychoteen but america is the richest country in the world and the only people unemployed are democrats who thought obama "got their back" or whatever. republicans doin' fine and dandy thanks very much.
getfiscal posted:Cycloneboy posted:
No they don't.
*points to current state of the economy*Umm dunno which planet you're on psychoteen but america is the richest country in the world and the only people unemployed are democrats who thought obama "got their back" or whatever. republicans doin' fine and dandy thanks very much.
actually Western Europe is the richest country in the world. and i should know! ima banker!
getfiscal posted:Cycloneboy posted:
No they don't.
*points to current state of the economy*Umm dunno which planet you're on psychoteen but america is the richest country in the world and the only people unemployed are democrats who thought obama "got their back" or whatever. republicans doin' fine and dandy thanks very much.
Nice attempt at a puppetmaster.
Pause, comma, not.
Please, I practically invented that technique. Don't step.
getfiscal posted:
europe is rich because america gave it money, patted it on the head, defended it for years and then said "go rape some africans, son"... :3
actually they gave america. The facts back me up. Also, europe is HELPING africa, see: libya, ivory coast, the success of nigeria, south africa
getfiscal posted:
dead psychoteen, capitalism is an effective way of managing an economy. if you are a real communist nowadays you are probably mentally ill.
oh, real nice, using mental illness as an insult. yeah, fuck you.