Dealbreaker - A Wall Street Tabloid - Business News Headlines an. Dealbreaker - A Wall Street Tabloid - Business News Headlines an. Brian Hunter faces charges of market manipulation - Jul. 8, 2008. (Fortune) -- There's a certain allure to the archetype of the rogue trader. As Jane Austen might have said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man who single-handedly loses a large fortune, especially one that wasn't of his own making, must be way more interesting than the average man.
After all, not just any old someone gets the chance to destroy massive amounts of capital, let alone force an entire company, and maybe even the entire market, to the edge of disaster - or over it. Those who do become part of business lore: Nick Leeson, Yasuo Hamanaka, Brian Hunter, Jerome Kerviel. But does the reality measure up to the myth? Brian Hunter, the former head natural-gas trader for Amaranth, the $10 billion hedge fund that infamously imploded in the fall of 2006 after Hunter's bets on the price of natural gas went spectacularly wrong, has earned himself a permanent spot among the legends. Fittingly, Hunter is an international man of mystery. That's about as emotional as Hunter gets. Financial Crookery. Hedge Fund.