A Madoff trading slip

Allow me to indulge my continuing Madoff fascination briefly.

His investors/customers/suckers would periodically receive trading slips, confirming a transaction that was supposed to have occurred two to five days before. They looked like the example above. Five days happens to be the spread between the trading date and the settlement date here.

I have to say that had I been an investor, I would have regarded such paperwork as reassuring. It looks official and proper. But then, I was probably the sucker born in that particular minute.

One oddity about the Madoff situation as late as 2007 was that there was no electronic access. Had Madoff been marketing his services as an investment manager to a young tech-savvy crowd, they would have wanted a website to which they could log in to see their results, or e-mailed updates. But his investors were content to receive old-fashioned dead-tree statements like this through the US postal service.

He was sending out a heck of a lot of these things on a regular basis for a long time. Peter Sander, in his recent book on the case, estimates that there were 184 direct victims, i.e. direct accounts receiving slips like this. That number may be a little high -- Sander's compilation might have resulted in some double counting, and only 125 of his names have dollar numbers attached to them.

Still, let's assume the number was 125. That's a lot of juggling. That means he was keeping 125 different balls in the air, so to speak. And he was doing it all himself? No confederates?

Just some random meditations for this morning. Madoff threw a heckof a boulder into the financial waters at a time when they were already roiled, and the good-sized ripples continue their outward spread.