Derivs - People and Markets

Citigroup has sold in excess of USD1 billion of products linked to a hedge fund replicator index since this time last year, with demand from institutional investors looking to mitigate their fund exposures.

DZ Bank’s head of sales in Northern Asia, Jit Yeow Lim, left the bank earlier this week and his boss Aik Kiong, head of Asia capital market sales in Singapore, has reportedly taken leave for personal reasons.

James Cooper, a G10 fx options trader formerly with Bank of America in New York, recently joined TD Securities and is in the process of transferring to Toronto with the firm.

UBS has hired a raft of credit cash and derivatives salespeople focusing on hedge funds in Europe. All report to Emmanuel Duclos, head of European credit sales.

Marco Piccioni, a managing director in retail structured product sales at Goldman Sachs in London, and Christoph Gugelmann, a managing director in fixed income, currencies and commodity sales for Germany and Austria at Goldman, are set to join Bank of America Merrill Lynch in new roles in October.

Hedge funds and some corporates have been selling one-week volatility on U.S. dollar currency pairs and buying calls of the same tenor, expecting that vol will fall following the release of U.S. non-farm payroll data this Friday.

RBC Capital Markets has reportedly halted efforts to market equity-linked products into Korea. The temporary move comes shortly after RBC became a focus of a review by Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service following the alleged mispricing of stocks underpinning structured products (DW Online, 8/24).

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are holding meetings today and tomorrow to get feedback on their plan to divvy up regulation of the financial markets, including over-the-counter derivatives.

Scotia Capital is in the midst of building out its New York equity derivatives desk. The Canadian bank told Derivatives Week the timing is predicated on a desire to capitalize while others are pulling back and on it having resources to spare since it avoided the worst of the financial crisis.

CME Group and the Options Clearing Corp. are separately considering clearing over-the-counter equity derivatives. The initiatives follow the Obama administration’s plan to have more OTC derivatives centrally cleared or traded on exchange.

Stephen Einchcomb, the ex-head of equity derivatives strategy at JPMorgan in London, joined Royal Bank of Scotland last week.

The EU Commission’s derivatives group is still waiting on responses from some of the “bigger, important investment banks,” on proposals to standardize the over-the-counter derivatives market, Sebastijan Hrovatin, secretary to the group in Brussels, told Derivatives Week today.