Mr. Five Percent: The Copper Trader Who Caused a $2.6 Billion Loss
How do you hide $1.8 billion in losses for over a decade? You stay at the same desk, you forge your boss’s signature, and you pray that the market turns around. Chapter 17 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Yasuo Hamanaka, a copper trader at Sumitomo Trading in Tokyo who controlled 5% of the global copper market, lied about it for eleven years, and brought down the biggest single-company trading loss the world had ever seen.