On January 24th, Societe Generale released a statement that they had been the victims of a fraud by one of their traders to the tune of €4.9 billion. They had discovered it on Friday, January 18th, 2007 and had been able to close all the positions within three trading days.
Not only were the fraudulent trades the largest loss in trading history, the position which lead to it was significantly larger than the whole capitalization of the bank!
As it is with all of these cases, Kerviel had been at it for some time. At one point he was actually up €1.4 billion. Which means that from the high watermark, he in fact lost € 6.3 billion !!
Apparently he was long €30 billion in the Dow Jones Eurostoxx 50, €18 billion in the DAX and €2 in the FTSE. Those are monstrous positions but even so, Kerviel was not able to buy his way into profits. Anyone who believes that the markets are manipulated is welcome to observe how this much buying power had no effect in turning the market.