Derivs - People and Markets

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has hired Michel Sindelar as head of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa emerging markets equities in London in a new role, according to a memo.

The China Banking and Regulatory Commission is making marketing and selling financial products aimed at wealthy private individuals harder.

Credit default swaps spreads on North American financial institutions widened another 1.7% in the past week, according to Fitch Solutions. By contrast, spreads on European sovereigns tightened 2% during that period.

Aaron Stambulich has left as head of structured products for Australia at Royal Bank of Scotland. Stambulich had joined the bank in 2009 when the bank mergers with ABN Amro, where he was head of equity structured products.

Broker-dealer ING Financial Partners has hired Andre Robinson as head of advisory business development and Rich Taylor as head of brokerage operations for its advisory business. Robinson most recently was v.p. of business development at Citigroup and Taylor was coo of Capital Guardian.

Barclays Capital has continued to expand it equities operations in Asia with the hiring of new bankers and addition of two new sectors to its Asia ex-Japan research. Joining the firm are Ephrem Ravi and Marcus Gunn from Morgan Stanley, and Scott Darling from Nomura.

Renaissance Capital has named John Hyman as co-head of investment banking and financing along with Andrew Cornthwaite. Based in Moscow, Hyman most recently was a partner in hedge fund Hyman and Cornthwaite and before that was co-head of global capital markets at Morgan Stanley.

Nomura has tapped Traiana to expand its exchange-traded derivatives client service platform.

A proposal by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that listed derivatives must have at least 85% of their markets traded through a central limit order books and a 15% by block trades may boost the over-the-counter derivatives market, according to futures industry leaders. Failure to meet those thresholds would lead to delisting.

Jurisdictional regulatory differences as well as product complexity will present U.S. clearinghouses with significant operational challenges in providing capital efficient clearing services to clients trading in the over-the-counter equity derivatives market especially, according to Amy Lawson, vice president at OCC, formerly known as the Options Clearing Corporation, on a panel at the Futures Industry Association's Options Expo 2011 in Chicago yesterday.

A tax on high-frequency trading in the U.S. is a bad idea, according to Terence Duffy, executive chairman of the CME Group on a panel at the Futures Industry Association’s Options Expo 2011 this morning.

Some countries will miss the Dec. 31, 2012 deadline for clearing and reporting to trade repositories all standardized over-the-counter derivatives set by G20 leaders in 2009, according to the Financial Stability Board.