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Credit Suisse First Boston is bringing aboard Kevin Qi, fixed income structurer at UBS in Singapore, as v.p. in a similar role in the Lion City.

Investors looking to gain hedge fund exposure are choosing structured products, which use derivatives to gain exposure to funds-of-funds over direct investments, according to product distributors.

Bernard Lee, former head of quantitative research at fund-of-hedge-funds manager Allianz Hedge Fund Partners, is starting a quantitative analytics group for hedge fund products.

Foreign exchange traders and analysts debating future movements of the U.S. currency were overwhelmingly bearish on the greenback and predicted a corresponding increase in volatility, with one pro arguing the U.S. dollar will weaken to USD2 against the euro in a decade.

In spite of recent scandals raising doubts by some over the effectiveness of self regulation in the foreign exchange markets the industry is overwhelmingly transparent and any attempts to regulate the asset class would create inefficiencies, according to Mark Snyder, chairman of the foreign exchange committee that is sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Hedge funds and other sophisticated traders were buying exotic options, such as reverse knockouts, on the euro and U.S. dollar currency pair last week with the effect of preventing the dollar from weakening further in the spot market.

Tokyo-based Aozora Bank plans to start marketing sophisticated structured products, including options on credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations referenced to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Commerzbank Securities has hired Lester Coyle, a structured credit trader at Bank One in Chicago, which has now been absorbed by JPMorgan, in a similar role.

Credit spreads for the senior tranches of collateralized debt obligations are expected to widen.

As the credit-default swap market matures, more and more names trade with significant liquidity across the entire range of tenors away from the traditional five-year point.

JPMorgan recently hired two traders in Tokyo from the newly-established French derivatives house Calyon to bulk up its yen interest rate trading desk.

RBS Greenwich Capital has hired Sanjeev Gupta, former global head of credit derivatives at Credit Suisse First Boston in London, to build its U.S. credit trading business.