Tricks of the trade: Jillian Ambrose

“You don’t have to break rules to make them work for you”

Rules are meant to be broken, right?

It’s easy to imagine, while we brush off the lingering economic debris of the crash, that this is the go-to adage for market ­traders. We’ve seen the stories: rogue traders, brazenly flouting rules that they think they are above. Even in the UK’s gas market, the dust has only recently settled on The ­Guardian’s front-page allegations that players were colluding to rig the Icis price index. But that’s the point – these stories make the news because they are the exception, not the norm.

In the current regulatory reality, compliance officers, regulation experts and ­lawyers outnumber the traders to ensure iron-clad due diligence. No trader goes out to break the rules. These are people whose days are spent making split-second decisions on risk and return. And possibly losing your career is not a risk worth taking.

But you don’t have to break the rules to make them work for you. And when you have enough compliance officers around, you can be sure that there will plenty of options found for doing just that. Anyone who remembers the rampant gaming of the market “pool” system will be well acquainted with just how much of a farce poorly thought out market regulation can become.

But the rest of us needn’t feel left out: the upcoming capacity market offers a smorgasbord of rules, and – one imagines – just as many ways of making them work in the favour of those who understand their limitations the best.

Let the games begin.