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HSBC has tapped Merrill Lynch for two officials to fill new slots as co-heads of equities in the global markets group for Asia-Pacific.

Rockville, Md.-based Rydex Investments is building out a series of exchange-traded funds which reference currencies.

JPMorgan has hired Lawrence Gibbs, an equity derivatives volatility trader at Millennium Partners in New York, for a new v.p. role in the chief investment office group run by Ina Drew, cio.

Investors in the region are getting more sophisticated and looking at more exotic credit structures in order to pick up yield, according to speakers.

Interest in relative-value option plays has started crackling in the wake of an implied volatility spike in options on European iTraxx credit derivatives indices and a swoon on the comparable North American CDX indices.

Everything is relative and the maxim some claim seems to apply to CDOs as well.

Amaury des Deserts, who covered structured equity and fund-linked sales to Germany and Austria, has left SG Corporate & Investment Banking in Frankfurt.

Speakers noted a recent move by Taiwanese regulators to widen the band of foreign assets in domestic collateralized debt obligations, moving away from synthetic-only CDOs to allow asset-backed securities and potentially other debt securities.

Standard Bank has hired David Johnston as head of structured equity trading for emerging markets in London.

Developments across the broader synthetic asset-backed securities market are expected to have an impact on the commercial mortgage-backed securities market in the coming months.

UBS has hired Jorge Ramirez, executive director in structured product development, from Goldman Sachs.

said Allan Smith, president and ceo of Saxon Financial in Toronto, discussing back testing it ran before issuing its first capital-protected note referencing one of its investment funds.