Derivs - Credit

Roughly 65% of equity fund managers expect returns of more than 5% this year, while only 7% of their fixed-income peers project the same, according to a survey by Aviva Investors.

UBS is promoting Paul Hamill to managing director of matched principal trading effective March 1.

UBS has unveiled the Price Improvement Network-Fixed Income—a trading platform for single name and index credit-default swaps. The platform is the first to allow users to make markets on names by making bids or offers inside the spread, according to UBS officials.

Here in the sovereign credit markets we are no strangers to Greece-induced volatility, so not many would have been surprised to see spreads oscillate on the various headlines that hit the wires.

Blake Schmidt, an executive director and interest rate options trader at Morgan Stanley in New York, has left the firm to join fixed income hedge fund Field Street Capital Management in a similar role.

Market participants have been focusing less on upcoming regulatory changes in Europe and the U.S. as markets have rallied.

The California Public Employees' Retirement System thinks portfolio managers will increase their use of credit default swaps to reduce economic risk on specific bond positions to deal with volatility induced by the Volcker rule.

Barclays Capital will no longer offer its credit default swap indices as of Feb. 29, citing disuse among market participants

Société Générale is recommending selling protection on the Markit high yield credit default index and buying five times the protection on the investment grade credit default index.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association has called for changes to plans by U.S. exchanges and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to revamp market-wide circuit breakers.

Alternative proposals in Europe for non-equity pre-trade transparency in the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II will be considered, although it is too early to say what form such rules will take, according to Markus Ferber, Member of the European Parliament, who is heading up MiFID for the Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.

JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Japan are generating business from local regional banks by creating a trust structure that will allow them to gain credit-linked exposures through loans.