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Goldman Sachs won the Americas Derivatives House Of The Year award and the U.S. Derivatives House Of The Year award at the Global Capital Derivatives Americas Awards ceremony on Tuesday evening, which saw the firm win five awards in total. Bank Of America Merrill Lynch came away with the credit and fx award categories, while UBS won the structured products award and the electronic trading award for its Neo platform. Other winners on the night included Tradeweb SEF, BlackRock, Metlife, Société Générale and CME Group. The award ceremony was sponsored by Milliman.

The skillset and experience of Marty Chavez is superlative—few can boast the same degree of commercial and technological savoir-faire that has brought such success to a wide array of businesses across all asset classes and functions

Banking funding rules should have diversity and stability in mind, and steer clear of favouring one funding format over another. But a Basel consultation document on the Net Stable Funding Ratio published this month, promotes the exact opposite, and will make bank funding less stable.

Italy took a radical approach to its latest BTP Italia in order to stop the bond reaching the epic size of its predecessors, but it didn’t work. With a redemption profile that is starting to resemble the Dolomites, the sovereign needs to sharpen its funding tools further.

The much heralded Asian M&A boom appears to be finally underway as leading names including Dongfeng Motor Corp, Lenovo and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp snap up companies. The willingness of banks to lend funds is driving acquisition momentum and with the economic environment perking up, it’s time for companies to splash out.

As if international sukuk were not already rare enough with only six dollar issuers so far in 2014, this week brought an even more unusual sighting — a deal that didn’t have an outrageously oversubscribed order book. Turkiye Finans can thank Damac Real Estate Development’s aggressive handling of investors for that, and so may the rest of the sukuk market.

I’m not a very funny man by nature. And whenever I am funny, the joke is usually on me. But it turns out one of my friends is even more hapless.

At $1.5bn, the order book for Turkiye Finans’s $500m sukuk return on Tuesday was not to be sniffed at. But demand didn't reach the dizzy heights of this year’s other dollar sukuk deals, and that is thanks to the market’s last issuer, Damac Real Estate Development.

High yield issuers just keep on flexing their muscles, showing investors where the power in the market lies. The latest totem to fall to the extreme supply-demand imbalance is call protection, now down to a new low of 1.5 years.

Russia’s domestic bond market is not deep enough to cover all issuers’ total refinancing needs, but getting it working again to show that issuers do have access to funding has its own value.

Bond investors seem desperate to get their hands on anything other than Chinese property and frontier market sovereigns are stepping up to the plate. Recent and lauded sovereign bonds from Sri Lanka and Pakistan have provided much needed diversification and appetite for frontier credits continues to be rife. Bangladesh has been waiting in the wings and now is the perfect time for it to take the plunge.

I’ve been meaning to see the cherry blossom in Japan, but something always crops up to prevent me sitting beneath the soft pink petals and contemplating the existence of man and other boring subjects.