Free content

The Royal Bank of Scotland has sold a EUR500 million collateralized bond obligation to Taiwanese investors in a structure that allows them to gain greater exposure to foreign assets.

Shooter Fund Management, a London-based hedge fund firm, expects its Shooter Bear Fund to more than double in size in the coming months.

Nervous hedge fund traders scooped up short-dated options across yen pairs last week ahead of a Bank of Japan meeting Wednesday.

Singaporean regulator the Monetary Authority of Singapore is allowing Singapore-based mutual funds to start using derivatives.

The launch of the tranched ABX, known as TABX, got off to an expected slow start last week as dealers waited to see who blinked first given the weight of bad news from mortgage lenders stirring up the cost of protection on asset-backed securities.

Corporate correlation players--as opposed to asset-backed securities portfolio managers--showed interest in the newly-launched tranched ABX index last week and that surprised some.

Oswald Grübel astonished the financial markets this week by announcing his retirement as chief executive of Credit Suisse Group, making way for investment banking CEO Brady Dougan.

Merrill Lynch has hired a structured credit salesman to expand sales to Middle East clients.

A London-based manager is marketing a high-grade synthetic CDO globally for the first time.

Citigroup and AXA Investment Managers are planning a second tap of a principal-protected long/short credit fund of single-name credit-default swaps, indices and bonds.

Merrill Lynch has transferred Duanmu Zhenyu, a senior exotic equity trader, to Hong Kong from New York to assume the role of head of equity structured products trading. Zhenyu is known in the market for his work modeling complex equity derivatives such as options on variance. Reached in Hong Kong, he noted that his new team in Asia was hiring, saying of the hires, "Tell everybody." Further questions about the move were forwarded to spokesman Mark Tsang who did not respond by press time. It could not be determined if this is a new position or a replacement.

CIBC World Markets in London has hired a head of marketing for European debt capital markets.