Trader thrust into spotlight

Bruno Iksil was dubbed the “London Whale” in credit markets because of the size of the trading positions he took, but for years he stayed below the surface, avoiding detection.

Now, the French-born Jpmorgan trader has been dragged from the anonymity of the trading floor into the eye of a very public storm over a $2-billion trading loss at the U.S. investment bank where Iksil worked in a little-known group called the Chief Investment Office (CIO).

Friends, colleagues and traders describe an unassuming man, a far cry from the brash image associated with traders staking huge bets in fastmoving markets.

“He’s not an arrogant trader, he’s quite the opposite. He’s very charming,” one former colleague said of Iksil.

There have been no suggestions that Iksil’s activities were in any way irregular, but, over a period of years, he and his team amassed a book of bets estimated by some to be $100 billion. When these became public, opportunistic hedge funds could not resist trading against the “Whale.”

As markets moved against him, whispers of Iksil’s enormous latent losses circulated, ultimately undermining JPMorgan’s reputation as the canniest risk manager in global finance.

For all the talk of the “Whale,” the handful of London bankers and traders who have done business with him say they know little about the man behind the trades.

“Everyone knows the whale. Whenever there was a big move in CDS markets, you knew it was the Whale,” one hedge fund manager said, adding that Iksil managed to maintain “a very low-profile” out of kilter with his big influence on the multitrillion-dollar credit default swaps market.

Staff from the bank’s investment-banking arm privately told management — including chief executive Jamie Dimon — that the CIO was an “accident waiting to happen.”