Derivs - People and Markets

Jim Strugger, an equity derivatives strategist at Société Générale in New York, is no longer with the firm.

Nervous investors are turning to independent index providers—despite the recent boom in proprietary bank indices, said Steven Goldin, v.p. of index and portfolio services at Standard & Poor’s, at yesterday’s StructuredRetailProducts.com conference.

Pierre-Yves Morlat, the former equity derivatives trading head at Société Générale, last week joined Credit Suisse in London.

Japan’s Shinsei Bank reportedly asked a number of senior staffers to step down recently, including Mark Mallia, global head of credit trading, and Stuart Baker, head of capital markets in Tokyo.

Niaz Haider, senior v.p. and head of structured fund products for the Americas at HSBC, has warned variable annuities issuers to ensure their risk managers work closely with product structurers so they don’t give investors so much choice that hedging becomes too difficult.

Dmitry Green, head of risk management at BlueMountain Capital Management, told attendees at the Global Association of Risk Professionals’ 10th annual conference in New York yesterday that the firm uses 40 proprietary stress tests for determining its capital at risk from market shocks.

Investors should look to portfolios using strategies such as minimum variance to gain greater returns, said Hartmut Graf, director and head of issuer data and analytics at Deutsche Börse, at today's retailstructuredproducts.com conference in London.

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture will hold a meeting tomorrow to consider the latest draft of the Derivatives Markets Transparency and Accountability Act of 2009, following two consecutive days of hearings on Capitol Hill.

A dispute between Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Wells Fargo Bank, concerning payment rights on a collateralized debt obligation where Lehman served as swap counterparty, is set for a pre-trial hearing March 11.

John Schofield, a structured credit strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland, is leaving the bank in London after being made redundant in late December, according to an official familiar with the matter.

Some end users think the industry committee being established to rule on whether credit default swaps should be triggered following certain credit and succession events and other issues pertaining to the new style of CDS contracts is too heavily weighted toward dealers.

Assénagon Asset Management, in Munich, is prepping four new credit funds under Jochen Felsenheimer and Wolfgang Klopfer, the newly appointed co-heads of credit.