An extraordinary story is buried on a scurrilous website that asked for readers’ most expensive mistakes, from a City IT type. I would dismiss it as apocryphal, except that it is hugely detailed and the terminology suggests an insider. Briefly, a big bank had a huge “straight-through processing” system, which allowed firms to clear and settle in a day. (These things are being developed, but with limited success.) It was widely used by other firms, and someone had decided to save about £300 a year on licensing fees by writing their own script. There was the inevitable bug. There were so many trades going through the system that if these were not settled, the resulting fines would have pulled the bank under. The IT people got the system up and running with two hours to spare before the affair would have been made public, but there were more than $100 million in fines, which were disguised in the accounts. No names. Any truth?

Stock-picker crushed by falling tractor wheel

It is this column’s lugubrious duty to point out when the towering intellects in the City we place in charge of our finances because of their intuitive grasp of market trends get it wrong. We hate it, honestly, we hate it. So shuffle forward Marina Bond, stock-picker, pundit and whiz in charge of Rathbone’s Smaller Companies Fund, who in her column in Money Week tipped Titan Europe, maker of big wheels for tractors partly because of the firm’s ability to pass on price increases to customers. The profit warning and shares collapse came four days later, partly because of the firm’s inability, etc, etc. “It’s very unfortunate timing,” admits a crushed-sounding Bond.

Jonathan Howell, departing finance director of the London Stock Exchange, will attract some sympathy for moving from a company that has withstood five potential or actual takeover bids to another, Close Brothers, that has just attracted one. It does sound like the rarest of bad luck. Or does it?

Howell announced the move last month, so his salary package, share options, etc, etc, have been approved. The options will presumably vest at the price when he took the job, so he’s already £2 a share in the money. Do they? “That hasn’t been made public,” says Close.

Even if they are priced when he joins, he has the chance of another turn if the bid succeeds. Howell has already made a small fortune from his shares and options in the LSE. Now he could do it again. Not that we begrudge him any of it, do we? Of course we do.

Can it be true? A colleague logging on to the website of Boden, the smug, yummie-mummie clothing retailer founded by Old Etonian Johnnie Boden, finds that the second question asked, after “how do I return the goods?” is “is Johnnie married?” Tragic. I have been stalking Boden’s West London home, going through the rubbish, and I can confirm that, yes, there is a Mrs Boden, girls, Sophia Henrietta.

Greenspan Spice. Now there’s a publicity idea

Sir Howard Davies has been musing about the pulling power of Alan Greenspan, when he recently visited the London School of Economics to promote his book. “In box-office terms he is right up there with Led Zeppelin and the reunited Spice Girls,” Sir Howard marvels in his column in Management Today. The tickets went on offer at 8am, and people began queueing around the block two hours earlier. “Since I have been at the school I don’t think I’ve every heard of a student being seen in a lecture theatre or a classroom at 6am, unless they were sleeping off a particularly heavy night.”

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