Derivs - Equity

Société Générale is developing two new Asian synthetic equity exchange-traded funds, while also considering whether to pull its Lyxor range of ETFs from the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Dealers in Hong Kong are seeing an increase in the use of custom basket swaps for hedging purposes as client knowledge of the instrument increases.

At the end of July 2011, European markets suffered major losses as fears around the Greek sovereign and the potential contagion to the rest of the Eurozone was reaching its paroxysm.

David Kwun, managing director in the equity derivatives group at HSBC, Tai Wei, senior v.p. in structuring and sales of fund-linked derivatives, and Nishant Mittal, senior v.p. in single stock derivatives trading, have exited the New York desk.

Deutsche Bank is looking at issuing more synthetic exchange-traded funds using frontier equity markets in 2012 to further grow its ETF business after recent success in the area.

Firms in Hong Kong are concerned they may have to comply with global and local regulations which will require special identity numbers to report transactions to the country’s imminent trade repository.

The equity market sell-off which began in earnest at the end of July this year has resulted in the EuroStoxx50 being down -20% on the year, falling around -18% from its late July levels.

Some U.S. and European hedge funds are buying variance swaps on the Nikkei 225 to position for volatility spikes related to Enman-sai—a novel local retail structured product.

Barclays Capital is to add pricing and execution capabilities for fx and commodities to its Comet equity structured product platform over the next few days.

The People’s Bank of China is reviewing whether the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors should produce an internationalized master agreement for Chinese derivatives.

UBS has launched a 90% capital protected structured note linked to a managed futures trading strategy that also features a lookback mechanism, the first structure of its kind publicly offered in Switzerland.

Nick Brown, an equity exchange-traded fund options trader who previously was at Citigroup for seven years, has joined BNP Paribas in New York.