Derivs - People and Markets

BNP Paribas is pitching the sale of long-dated volatility when one currency has traditionally been higher yielding than another, with the expectation the market will recover in 2010 and vol will come down.

Missouri insurance regulators are waiting for federal government proposals on policing credit default swaps before formally nixing their own plans.

Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux, an equity broker and subsidiary of Calyon, will begin offering institutional investors access to the Saudi Arabian stock market, also known as Tadawul, via equity swaps.

Questions have been raised in Asia as to whether banks have been overvaluing swaps featured in synthetic structured credit deals. The issue is they have reportedly not been incorporating the swap counterparty’s own risk of default.

Assured Guaranty Corp. is banking on its acquisition of Financial Security Assurance to give it the capacity to go after bigger ticket rewraps of existing structured finance wrappers written by monolines that were downgraded.

NewOak Capital has hired Patrick Mooney, most recently a managing director at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, as its chief operating officer.

Rachel Lord, head of global capital markets equity derivatives for Europe, Middle East, Africa at Morgan Stanley in London, resigned this week and is expected to resurface at Citigroup in May.

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

The head of securitization in the Americas at Mizuho Corporate Bank is leaving to head a commercial real estate finance group in Tokyo after eight years in New York.

Asia corporates are increasingly demanding the services of third-party valuation companies to help evaluate their exposure to derivatives.

Mikhail Foux, head of U.S. credit and derivatives strategy at Citigroup in New York, is recommending a relative value strategy that involves selling credit default swaps on Time Warner Cable and buying CDS on parent company Time Warner Inc.

Lawyers are seeing interest from banks looking to set up one-off trusts for high net worth retail clients so they can market structured products to investors worried about counterparty credit risk.