The trading community walk on a knife edge all the time, it's not a place for the faint of heart. I used to support derivatives trading systems and a few times there were issues that meant they'd lost control of orders on an exchange. Scary stuff. It requires a crazy mixture of careful, deliberate, calculated risk control on the one hand; but once you commit to something you jump in with both feet and throw everything into it.

You need to be both meticulously risk averse, and also willing to do whatever needs to be done when it needs doing, and accept responsibility. It was great!

I worked at UBS on the G10 FX options desks in Stamford and Singapore. Remember being very surprised by how my interview and training were incredibly stressful. It was very intentional as well, where my trainer knew the exact reactions he was creating with his behavior.

It was only a couple of weeks in, when I had to react within 60 seconds (USDJPY option expiry, NYC cut) on a position our front book would have lost MM on; with senior sales MDs screaming at me as well. Lo and behold, I was just used to it and could focus and execute based on my training.

My wife calls my thinking on the training - Stockholm syndrome. I still believe those skills were incredibly valuable for me, just perhaps delivered in a more 2021 acceptable approach.

An excellent description.

> but a bank is definitely not one of them

Investment banks are basically risk-management shops. The partner made an assessment and evaluated the potential benefits as higher than risks. Note the word "probably".

Also worth mentioning that "unapproved software" on bank infrastructure is what an aggressive prosecutor would call "felony bank hacking".

Almost definitely false. Provided you weren't doing anything intentionally malicious with it, the risk would be that regulators might fine the bank for inadequate controls. As such, the bank might fire you for doing something that could lead to such a situation, but I don't see a criminal charge. There was actually quite a decent bit of "unapproved" software in use at one of the banks I worked in - mostly stuff that was in the process for approval, but that could take forever, so it was reasonably common for teams to run through the checks themselves (security scan, license review, etc) and move forward while the official review confirmed no issues.

Well the login message I was greeted with on every ssh connection certainly threatened criminal prosecution for unapproved software at the extremely large bank I worked at.

Unlikely? Sure. But a lawyer somewhere thought it was worth reminding me 10x/day, so going to assume it's possible provided your unauthorized software caused a serious monetary loss.

Investment banks at that time were a little bit different.