Deceive

Marketer rankings by volume clearly do matter; otherwise energy companies wouldn’t go out of their way to deceive investors and counterparties by doing “round-trip” or “wash” trades, which are purely designed to boost volumes and trading revenues. Reliant, Dynegy and CMS last week all admitted to round-trip trading, in which two companies buy and sell back a given volume of gas or power at the same price to give the appearance of larger trading operations.