Boastful chatter among young traders, preserved in digital archives, has come back to haunt Barclays Plc as it defends itself against allegations that it manipulated U.S. energy markets. “I just started lifting the piss out of the Palo,” Ryan Smith, then a trader for Barclays in New York, wrote in a 2006 instant message, allegedly bragging to a colleague that he had raised the price on an energy hub near Palo Verde, Arizona. In another, he used a profane term for a sexual encounter to describe what he had done to the market. “Was fun. Need to do that more often,” he wrote. These messages and others have surfaced in ... (full story)