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Bear Stearns has been building up its Tokyo-based business in recent months and plans to accelerate the effort on expectations of a strong year in Japan.

Banc of America Securities is looking to sell its fund-linked structured products platform, which rivals described as the most successful in the U.S.

Calyon is setting up a hybrid derivatives team in London and has appointed Stephane Amsellem, global head of non euro exotics in London, to spearhead the effort.

Credit Suisse First Boston has hired Marcus Wedl and Federico Ursino, flow salesmen at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Frankfurt.

In this two-part Learning Curve, we describe how dividends impact some of Europe's most liquid convertible bonds, how dividend protection features in certain convertibles may compensate holders for this risk (to some extent), how to estimate the resulting dividend sensitivity (µ) of convertibles and strategies for hedging the dividend risk in convertibles, including relatively new products such as dividend swaps.

The first property swap was executed by Eurohypo and Deutsche Bank between two matched counterparties two weeks ago.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation will roll out a matching and confirmation service for interest rate swaps and swaptions next month and plans to expand its equity derivatives confirmation service to include total return and variance swaps by spring.

Hedge funds are increasingly looking to trade weather derivatives either as a non-correlated play or as an investment strategy.

Investors are starting to sell structured credit products, which they had purchased a few years ago, back to banks to monetize the spread tightening since they first took exposure to the instruments.

The price of credit-default swaps on General Motors Acceptance Corp. soared to around 280 basis points Thursday from 230bps at the start of the week after General Motors Corp. released fourth quarter results on Wednesday.

IXIS Corporate & Investment Bank is structuring a synthetic collateralized debt obligation that will be sold globally and will be the firm's first offering for which it will manage a portfolio deal in-house.