James Archer (stock trader)

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James Archer is an English businessman and former stockbroker. His father is Jeffrey Archer, the ex-Conservative politician.

As a teenager James Archer attended Eton College, where he became captain of the athletics team. He then went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he and three friends shared a large three-storey house with a Colombian hired help who did the laundry and cleaning and provided breakfast in bed.^[1]

In London, Archer rose to fame as a member of a cadre of five self-publicising young stockbrokers calling themselves the "Flaming Ferraris" after the rum cocktail they adopted as their trademark drink.^[2][1] In December 1998, they orchestrated a public relations stunt which ensured that they were pictured arriving at Nobu, an expensive Japanese restaurant in Park Lane, in what The Independent characterised as "Reservoir Dogs-style".^[1] The stunt, intended to raise their profile and further increase their then-significant earnings, backfired.^[1]

James Archer was handed down a life ban on working in the City of London by the Financial Services Authority in 2000,^[2][3] after being found to have attempted to manipulate the closing price of the Swedish stock exchange through aggressive short-selling shortly after the Nobu debacle.^[1] Archer was required to pay £50,000 towards the legal costs of the Securities and Futures Authority.^[2]

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