A lesson from the UK: it is not advisable to spend three hours at the bar, then walk back to your desk and take a massive short position. Even if you ultimately profit on it. FSA doesn’t take kindly to that sort of thing:

Let’s call it the Bubbling Crude: a potent and pricey cocktail of drinking and trading. It has cost one former Morgan Stanley freight and oil trader dearly. A three-hour lunch turned into a two-year regulatory ban from the industry for David Redmond, after he took out a big alcohol-induced short position.

Redmond wasn’t “visibly drunk” when he got back to his desk around 5 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon in February 2008, according to the Financial Services Authority notice. The U.K. regulator recounts that for the next two-and-a-half hours he proceeded to place an order every eight seconds.

Redmond must have been sufficiently alert to know something was wrong. The $10 million loss exposure was over his risk limit. He moved the bet overnight onto the trading book of one of his colleagues. But it didn’t take long for his bosses to catch on, and Redmond was dismissed a month later.

Before he was discovered, though, Redmond managed to buy back enough of the futures to close out his short position at a small profit.

Other than the two year visit from the Ban Hamster, Redmond was also sacked by Morgan for gross misconduct. However, I’m reading rumors this morning that he has been picked up by Barclays and working some position where he doesn’t have to be registered (prop desk mixologist?) so, kudos to BarCap for knowing how to party hard.