The fund was highly leveraged to a sector that is routinely highly volatile, and there appeared to be a breakdown of risk monitoring within the firm that allowed its position to grow as large as it did.

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"We are fully committed to working within a risk and compliance framework that protects our customers' and our firm's assets, " FCStone CEO Sean O'Connor said in a statement.

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Chief among these are that access rights should be reviewed in conjunction with business managers at some regular interval (quarterly or monthly, depending on your risk disposition), anytime someone undergoes a significant role transfer within a firm, and most importantly when someone leaves a firm.

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There was, in fact, a vigorous debate within Goldman about the right level, just as there was over the firm's overall risk levels.

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"I wanted to go to North Korea and because it was not yet mapped I decided to start mapping so I could at least see how easy it would be to travel within the country, " Sebastiaan van Oyen, who works as a risk manager for a financial trading firm in Sydney, told the BBC.

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