Some people would tag this “fail,” but I’m going to go ahead and tag it “win”. For most people, if they get too drunk, they’ll wake up with the occasional random bruise, lost credit card, unattractive person in their bed, or something else mundane and regrettable.

This dude though – he burned through $520 mil in trades and moved the price of oil (h/t to Bart L. for the story!):

It’s probably not uncommon for City traders to wonder how they burnt so much cash during a drunken night on the town. But Steve Perkins was left with a bigger black hole in his memory than most when his employer rang one morning to ask what he’d done with $520m of the oil trading firm’s money. The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades.

A likely story. It’s 2am, a client comes over, he can’t sleep, he’s banging on your door begging to trade some oil futures, so you let him in, and he just won’t leave. Right? Wrong.

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

By the time PVM realised the trades were not authorised and swiftly began to unwind the positions, losses of exactly $9,763,252 had stacked up. The amount was almost equal to PVM Oil Futures’ entire annual revenue of $12m and caused a $7.6m loss last year – shared by the senior brokers who are its only shareholders.

This happened a year ago, but the details have just been made public by the Financial Services Authority today. And apparently, this guy was on a hell of a bender, getting sloshed at a golf event the day prior and trading erratically that day, as well. The FSA ultimately made him get alcohol treatment and fined him what I think works out close to $1 million, but didn’t ban him from trading. They did, however, make a note that “Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk”, which amuses me, because the only thing I pose an extreme risk to when drunk is the AmEx concierge people who never know what to do with my random 3AM calls where I’m asking if they can deliver penguins or some such task. So, props to you, Steve Perkins – not as many props as if you had rung up $9.7 million in profits while you were trashed, but props for having that much swagger nonetheless.