Derivs - Equity

Stefanos Bitzakidis, a managing director and senior exotic equity derivatives trader at Morgan Stanley in London, is expected to land at Citigroup.

ABN AMRO has listed a first-of-a-kind installment warrant on the Australian Stock Exchange that features an embedded stop-loss rather than the more typical put option, which is triggered if the value of the underlying share plummets a set percentage.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria has hired Daryl Chen, head of equity structured products in Asia for Deutsche Bank, to run its equity derivative sales effort in the region.

John Paulson sees plenty of opportunities in the coming year. He is bullish on distressed mortgages, distressed debt, debt restructurings, bankruptcies, strategic mergers and event arbitrage.

An unidentified North American bank is said to be looking at writing leveraged total return swaps for funds of funds investing in distressed assets.

Broker MF Global has added 16 staffers in Singapore to form a new energy derivatives desk there and five to its Hong Kong office focusing on equity.

A new set of indices being developed by FOEX Indexes, part of the Finnish Options Exchange, will track the price of wood pellets in Europe and North America and allow utilities to hedge the cost of the raw material for clean energy projects via swaps.

A pair of banks is in talks to structure derivatives linked to indices on Pakistan’s largest bourse. The development comes after the Karachi Stock Exchange and German consulting firm Structured Solutions signed a deal this week to draw banks as licensees to use KSE’s indices as underlyings.

Darren Baggett, a managing director in index trading at Morgan Stanley in London, resigned last week.

Macquarie Bank is in discussions with a trio of European banks to piggyback on existing structured product platforms they own in the U.S. to broaden its retail sales effort until it has approval for its own.

Annual bonuses for European Deutsche Bank employees will be cut by at least 75%, with structured product players and senior staffers expected to receive the least.

Mark Green, a senior equity derivatives trader at Merrill Lynch in London, has left the bank.