Selon Thami Kabbaj, le jeune financier ayant fait perdre cinq milliards d'euros à la Société Générale est loin d'être une exception.
Pierre-Alexandre Sallier
Mercredi 17 septembre 2008
Rubrique: Supplément spécial
Un homme - jeune, ambitieux, intelligent - devait symboliser en ce début d'année tous les excès de la finance: Jérôme Kerviel, simple trader ayant pu mettre en péril l'équilibre financier d'un grand groupe bancaire français, la Société Générale, employant 134000 salariés. Et reflétant tous les ressorts psychologiques à l'œuvre dans le monde du trading.
«Ce qui m'a tout d'abord surpris est la réaction des médias, des professionnels de marché et du grand public; tous considéraient Jérôme Kerviel comme étant victime d'un complot de la part de ses supérieurs hiérarchiques, alors que celui-ci n'a jamais nié ses actes», relate Thami Kabbaj. Pour ce dernier, le trader de la Société Générale est tombé dans le piège d'un biais psychologique classique: l'excès de confiance. «Il pensait être un génie des marchés et il s'est mis à prendre des risques de plus en plus importants», explique cet expert, qui a lui-même travaillé comme trader à la City de Londres.
La perte de contrôle du jeune financier sur ses décisions - les pertes colossales enregistrées dans un premier temps l'ont poussé à prendre des risques importants - se retrouve également au cœur des travaux de Daniel Kahneman, Prix Nobel d'économie en 2002: les pertes sont en général bien plus douloureuses en valeur absolue que la satisfaction retirée pour un gain de même ordre. Conséquence, «l'investisseur refuse de perdre et préfère augmenter son exposition, voire prendre plus de risques, plutôt que d'accepter la perte et de couper sa position», résume Thami Kabbaj.
Inefficacité des contrôles
Pour ce dernier, «les agissements de Kerviel peuvent également s'expliquer par de graves défaillances sur le plan organisationnel» au sein de la banque française. Comme la formation insuffisante des employés du back-office, chargés de l'exécution des ordres de bourse, du règlement et du reporting, pour déceler les erreurs de trading. Ou le partage des bonus, les collaborateurs du back-office bénéficiant d'une rémunération liée à la performance des traders qu'ils sont censés contrôlés. Ou encore la rotation du personnel très importante au sein de ces services de contrôle, «qui n'ont pas bonne réputation, surtout dans le système de caste caractérisant les banques françaises, avec d'un côté les diplômés des écoles les plus prestigieuses obtenant les postes du front office et de l'autre les employés du back-office simplement issus des universités publiques». Kerviel était une exception, puisque, bien qu'issu de l'Université de Lyon, il avait débuté au sein des métiers du contrôle avant d'accéder au poste tant convoité de trader.
Ainsi, à en croire Thami Kabbaj, au-delà du secteur financier, le problème de la Société Générale «reste un problème franco-français lié à un élitisme basé sur le prestige des mathématiques et plus précisément sur le parchemin de certaines grandes écoles». Un élitisme qui en vient à terme à scléroser le monde de l'entreprise. Ces spécificités sont cependant loin de faire de Jérôme Kerviel une exception française.
«Cela peut surprendre, mais ce dernier représente un comportement très répandu dans le monde financier; la plupart des gérants et des traders ne sont pas très disciplinés et tombe souvent dans le piège des biais psychologiques», poursuit le spécialiste. Les banques en ont cependant conscience et ont instauré des règles extrêmement strictes de gestion des risques, surveillées en temps réel.
Le piège des émotions
Autant de contraintes déjouées par Jérôme Kerviel dont l'exposition maximale a atteint jusqu'à 50 milliards d'euros, alors que celle de son desk n'aurait pas dû dépasser 125 millions.
Humains, trop humains traders, dont seule une infime minorité réussit à maîtriser ses émotions et à générer des performances de manière régulière. «La discipline impose une bonne maîtrise de ses émotions et pour cela un travail conséquent doit être effectué; or cette dimension psychologique est souvent négligée dans les formations financières», souffle Thami Kabbaj. Et ce dernier de souligner que «ce n'est pas pour rien que Steve Cohen - le célèbre gérant de hedge fund - a recruté un psychologue, Ari Kiev, pour surveiller et pour coacher les traders opérant au sein de sa salle de marché». Faudra-t- il bientôt installer un divan à côté de la machine à café de chaque salle de marché?
© Le Temps, 2008. Droits de reproduction et de diffusion réservés.
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By CANDICE CHOI and ELLEN SIMON
AP Business Writers
15 September 2008
16:07
Associated Press Newswires
NEW YORK (AP) - Steve Levy left Lehman Brothers in 2005 but called his former secretary there on Monday to offer his support. She burst into tears after answering the phone.
She wasn't the only one.
The financial hurricane that whipped through Wall Street Monday suddenly made the Street, long a source of fabulous wealth, look uncertain and scary. In New York, where a half-million people work in finance, nearly everyone was shaken, from hedge fund billionaires to secretaries from Queens.
Lehman, the fourth largest investment bank in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization Monday, the same day Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America Corp. in a snap deal for roughly $50 billion. Meanwhile, American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer, and Washington Mutual Inc., the nation's largest thrift bank, were rumored to be close to ruin.
"How did this mess get so big?" said Levy, who worked at Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. for seven years before leaving in 2005.
The roughly 25,000 workers at Lehman, as well as many of the 60,000 at Merrill, face a double whammy: Many will lose their jobs and the companies' plunging share prices likely wiped out much of their net worth.
At Lehman, stock and options could make up as much as 60 percent of an executive's pay and share awards vested over five years. For most employees, stock and options were about 40 percent of pay, with the same vesting schedule.
On Monday, groups of grim-faced employees walked into Lehman's million-square-foot headquarters on Seventh Avenue, many of the men wearing Lehman-green ties and the women in green shirts. One woman wore a green dress.
Lehman's doors were flanked by security guards, one with a black guard dog. Employees walked past reporters and gawkers lined up behind metal barricades, as bystanders took pictures with their mobile phones. They brought gym bags, shopping totes and Lehman travel bags to cart home personal files and pictures from their desks.
Lehman workers called professional friends up and down Wall Street to give them their personal contact information. Analysts, afraid the company's server might go down, wrote farewell e-mails to clients, signing off with their cell phone numbers and personal e-mail addresses.
News trucks were camped out outside the building and reporters were there at dawn, waiting for employees. The media had worn out their welcome: A coffee truck by the company's office put up a cardboard sign last week saying, "No coffee for Lehman reporters."
In brief interviews, workers in New York who requested anonymity described themselves as shocked and devastated.
"We really didn't see this coming. We thought some bank would buy Lehman," said Duo Ai, who worked in research in Lehman's London office. "Any other option would be better than this."
The consensus in finance was that this would just be one more in a succession of grim days following the mortgage bust.
"It's like a bad flu," said Steve Schlussler, a director at CapitalSource, a smaller financial firm near Lehman. "You have to get violently ill to get better."
"The Fed can't bail everyone out," he said.
For workers, the year has brought waves of layoffs -- some announced cuts of thousands of jobs, some quieter culling of hundreds. Wall Street firms have slashed the ranks of contractors and hacked at expenses like car service and business travel.
"The Wall Street that we knew was gone when we woke up this morning," said Anthony Conroy, head trader for BNY ConvergEx Group, who said he worked a 12-hour day Sunday and arrived at his office Monday at 5 a.m.
Bad times in finance mean bad times in New York City, because the sector is an outsized proportion of the city's total payroll.
While finance and insurance account for only 7 percent of the jobs in Manhattan, the sector accounts for one-quarter of total pay, according to the Census Bureau. The Street's bankers, techies and messengers brought home a grand total of $93.1 billion in 2006, the most recent data available.
Outsiders said the Street's veterans would rebound.
"If you're a trader, 40 percent of the time, you're wrong," said Ari Kiev, a New York city psychiatrist who treats financial sector workers and author of "Mastering Trading Stress."
"Part of job is learning how to ride out downturns," Kiev said. "You have more experience dealing with disasters than the ordinary person."
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Controlling Interest
The path to financial glory and independence is paved with small, deliberate, incremental steps.
by Ari Kiev
Many people earn enormous sums of money at the price of their own individuality and sense of independence. Such people seem to forget that it's not so much the size of your salary that matters most, but rather the extent to which you feel true contentment. That means, above all else, being comfortable with the standard of living you've chosen for yourself.
Complete self-reliance is something we all covet. The richest men in the world have invariably depended on themselves, not others, in order to accrue their wealth. The more you recognize that you alone are responsible for your financial independence, the more you'll find ways to increase your income.
At the highest levels, though, the purpose of wealth accumulation is not to facilitate big-ticket purchases of obsolescent gadgets or status symbols. I've observed that those who use their earnings to accomplish worthy goals typically wind up developing a healthier sense of self-belief, which buoys their overall moneymaking. The more you link your efforts to earn to your efforts to accomplish some other, broader objective, the more each goal will serve the other.
More to the point: The acquisition of wealth results from planned actions designed to apply existing resources. Given that we earn money via effort, and not by luck or chance, you must focus on small, regular, detailed steps that you can readily control.
Look for ways to increase your output in your current position. Take the time to establish clear financial goals: the amount of money you wish to earn, the amount of money you wish to save and the amount of money you wish to stock away for your retirement. Record these figures on a small index card so that they might serve as a reminder of your financial goals. They may also, in turn, help alert you to new opportunities.
In his famous essay collection The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that "wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot."
Efforts motivated solely by one's desire for monetary reward inevitably lead only to frustration. Some people use money to keep score, and that too has its pitfalls. Human beings are more than just a bank statement. As the saying goes: How much would you be worth if you lost everything? For some, no amount is ever enough -- but that's another column.
Perhaps you feel guilty about earning a substantial income, even if you do so through your own diligence and industry. Why should you feel guilty about doing something you enjoy to the best of your ability? Perhaps you've established a ceiling on the amount you're willing to earn. This may sound ludicrous to some, but I've seen people grapple with the question of "how much is too much?" I don't believe there needs to be a limit to your wealth, especially if you're using it to fund some objective that has a distinct societal benefit. Such an end would surely be well worth any hardships you might encounter along the way. Many people make the mistake of setting financial goals and then mistakenly lapse into contentment once they reach those initial objectives.
If you choose to set financial goals for yourself that are in excess of your current income, you'll be well-advised to determine who earns that amount, how he earns it and what steps you must take to earn it yourself. Focus on an investment approach that produces results consistently. If you don’t achieve your desired results, reexamine the process.
Remember: Don't focus on the money per se, but on the activities you can pursue that will best help you get it. When you do, you'll thus be able to measure its value in terms of actual work accomplished. If you earn it lightly, you'll view it lightly. If you sweat to earn it, by contrast, you'll value each dollar more meaningfully -- and spend it more wisely.
Copyright © 2008 Doubledown Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Trader Monthly, 240 West 35th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10001
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Ari Kiev, M.D., president of SPRI Clinical Trials, was a featured speaker at the upcoming conference Wall Street Unplugged: The Trout Group Investor Seminar -- Management's Guide to Wall Street. The conference was held on Wednesday, July 30, at Midtown Loft & Terrace, 267 Fifth Avenue in New York. The event was targeted to CEOs and CFOs at private and small and mid-cap life science companies to gain better insight into Wall Street and maximize communication with the investment community. View the video here.
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Tuesday August 26, 1:34 pm ET
By Eileen Aj Connelly, AP Business Writer
Volatile market can increase stress for investors; sticking to a plan can relieve anxiety
NEW YORK (AP) -- With the stock market regularly posting triple-digit swings and commodity prices jumping up and down, it's easy to understand why some investors are stressed out.
"There's a lot of volatility, emotionality and irrationality," observed Dr. Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist and author of "Mastering Trading Stress: Strategies for Maximizing Performance."
Though he focuses on how hedge fund traders handle stress, Kiev said the market's recent volatility can trigger the same emotional and physical issues for individual investors. "I think the human psychological underpinning of buying and selling stocks is pretty universal for both the amateur and the professional," he said. But when the stakes are personal, like a family's college or retirement fund that's losing value, the resulting stress may seem a bit different.
ASSESS YOUR RISK. One way to help reduce your investment-related anxiety is to understand your appetite for risk, and allocate your investments accordingly. A start might be taking an online quiz that helps assess risk tolerance. There are many available on the Web, including one at the Rutgers University personal finance site at http://njaes.rutgers.edu/money/.
Several factors influence what kind of risk is appropriate, from your age to the particular goal involved: buying a home, sending one or more children to college, or preparing a comfortable retirement, for example.
"If you're a younger person, with a much longer time horizon, with much greater risk tolerance, markets like this give you an excellent opportunity to put more money to work," said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors in New York City.
MAKE A PLAN. After deciding how much investment risk you are comfortable with, you should identify your goals and develop a plan to achieve them, said Orlando. If you're unable to develop that plan on your own, hire some help, he said. "Establish what your needs are, what your goals are, what your plans are, and the professionals will sit down and put together a program with an acceptable level of risk tolerance."
"You need to be well armed with an array of plans for all situations," agreed Don Montanaro, chief executive officer of TradeKing, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based online brokerage. "You need to spend time educating yourself so that you're prepared for all different types of markets."
ADHERE TO THE PLAN. Even more important than making a plan is sticking with it.
"Under stress, people tend to not follow their strategy," noted Kiev. Just like professional traders trying to justify wrong decisions, individuals might try to hold on to stocks that have turned bad, take on extra risk to make up for losses or sell a winning investment before it has peaked in a move sparked by fear. "People hold on to losers because they don't want to admit they're wrong, they think things are going to get better," he said.
BUILD IN SAFEGUARDS. Montanaro said such stumbles, and the related stress, can be avoided by building entry-point and exit-point targets into an investing plan. "When you go into a trade, you have to have some idea of when you get out of a trade," he said. "At the moment you enter a trade, you should set that exit plan up."
The easiest way to do that is to set up a stop loss order with a brokerage when making a purchase. Such orders set the price at which you would automatically sell a stock when it declines to a certain level.
Montanaro said such built-in moves can help investors avoid getting emotionally involved in daily fluctuations. "You've got to stick to your rationale," he said. "If you find yourself rooting for or cheering for your stock as if it's a sports team, you have to step back."
Kiev echoed the thought. "When you're anxious and you're stressed, you tend to overreact," Kiev said. "That tends to escalate your anxiety and makes matters worse."
MANAGE YOUR STRESS. Kiev recommends using stress-reduction techniques like meditation, yoga and visualization to help handle the feelings that can lead to emotional investing, and notes such methods are most effective when practiced regularly. "When you're in the middle of a stressful market," he said, "it's very hard at that moment to start applying these principles."
Seeking input from fellow investors, for instance in an online forum, can also help, said Montanaro. "Just because you have decided to become a self-directed investor and make your own decisions, you still shouldn't go it alone," he said. "Sometimes you can get so deep into your own analysis tunnel, that popping your head out into the sunshine is a great thing to give you some alternate perspectives on your view."
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