Goldman, Dresdner, the hedge fund and the barrier
Most of the comments have been positive. “The whole way the market conducts itself (around barriers) is a major issue. Nobody wants to have a formal code of conduct and to some extent the banks are holding a gun to their own heads,” one hedge fund salesman told the Weekly FiX.
A slightly different take came from a senior options trader, who witnessed what was going on. He said that the main problem is that nobody really knows what the rules are. But he added that it would be the hedge funds in particular that wouldn’t want to see these formalized.
Finally, one trader who was asked if anything else had developed, replied: “Just the threatened legal nonsense but I’d be honestly happy if they did that as they’d have to disclose a lot of stuff into the public domain, and they ain’t ever doing that. So my view is it was one last chancing of their arm and this is the last we’ll hear of it.”