Derivs - People and Markets

Citadel Securities, the investment banking and multi-asset-class market-making arm of Citadel Investment Group, is set to unveil an expanded credit trading platform next month and has tapped a handful of professionals with credit derivatives backgrounds for the launch.

Société Générale has added several staffers in credit trading in London recently and continues to look for more. “We’re trying to expand and to keep our European credit trading facility at the highest level, while developing our New York credit platform,” François Popon, global co-head of credit trading, told Derivatives Week.

Strategists at Morgan Stanley are recommending investors buy call spreads on Hyundai Motor Co., since the firm's analysis shows the Korean car maker has seen a 435% year-on-year increase in unit sales for the first two weeks of August, putting it second only to Volkswagen in terms of the volume of cars shifted.

Goldman Sachs is offering to replace users’ non-standardized credit default swaps featuring ‘modified restructuring’ with the new ones bearing ‘no restructuring’ trading conventions. It believes contracts on the old format hold secondary market value, but on the other side buysiders need to get out of Mod R contracts, since they are no longer liquid.

Khaled Hobballah, executive director and head of fixed income derivatives marketing at JPMorgan in London, resigned last week.

Emmanuel Delattre, managing director and head structured product sales into France and the Nordic region at Merrill Lynch, is set to join Royal Bank of Scotland.

South African regulators are looking at over-the-counter derivatives, focusing on contracts-for-difference as well as credit default swaps.

Hedge funds in Japan are beginning to buy vanilla over-the-counter structures again, mainly referencing equities, according to salespeople in Tokyo.

Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service is looking into additional regulation of equity-linked notes after receiving allegations of manipulation.

JPMorgan’s valuations unit, PricingDirect, which provides daily valuations for fixed income securities and derivatives, had hired two new staffers.

Société Générale is bullish on emerging markets and its fx strategists are recommending a quark outperformance call option to express that sentiment.

Traders have been buying puts on the Canadian dollar, positioning for a loonie slide against the U.S. dollar, possibly because of the Bank of Canada’s official stance against its currency strengthening.