Whale of Trade Shown at Biggest U.S. Bank With Best Control

“We are dead I tell you,” Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader at JPMorgan Chase & Co., messaged an associate on March 23, 2012. “It is hopeless now.”

Iksil, a Frenchman who would soon become known as the London Whale because of the size of his trades, had lost $44 million on corporate-credit bets three days earlier and was down more than $500 million for the year, Bloomberg Markets will report in its July issue. He and junior trader Julien Grout, under pressure from their manager, had tried to hide the extent of losses that would swell to more than $6.2 billion, the bank’s biggest trading blunder ever.