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Regulatory changes in Europe have opened up structured products linked to hedge funds and mutual funds to new investors.

Quest Partners has been having a difficult time with its global macro fund, which is down 27% year-to-date through November.

The 2000 International Swaps and Derivatives Association definitions for interest rate and currency derivatives will be updated next year.

India and Korea are showing signs of following Taiwan's lead and allowing an onshore credit market.

ISDA will commission netting opinions for the Czech Republic, India, Barbados and Iceland next year as part of its plan to further expand the jurisdictions in which it has legal certainty on the netting and collateral provisions in its Master Agreement.

ISDA plans to publish a credit event guide targeted at end users of credit derivatives.

KEB Commerz Investment Trust Management Co., with over KRW4 trillion (USD3.7 billion) in assets, is considering launching a mixed domestic equity/fixed income fund, which may use interest rate swaps.

"I don't actually exist."--David Bullen, foreign exchange options trader at National Australia Bank,outlining his unusual response to being suspended while the NAB investigates rogue trading losses (DW, 1/26).

Asian regulators' increasingly open stance toward the international financial markets has removed many of the barriers to trading in domestic markets and will likely slowly kill the market access products industry.

The credit derivatives market in Europe was quiet last week in spite of some widening of retail protection prices, as traders, brokers and clients got in to the holiday mood.

Despite the fourth-quarter uptick in the equity markets, investors have largely endured a difficult year.

--Peter Zhang, chief financial engineering advisor and senior director of research at the Shanghai Futures Exchange, commenting on the planned launch of options on the exchange.