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Nick Waltner, managing director and head of equity financial products at Bank of America in Tokyo, has quit and plans to set up a hedge fund in the U.S. "It's time to move on," noted Waltner, after working in Japan for nine years. He will head back to Seattle to start up a quantitative relative value strategy fund, dubbed Kulshan Asset Management, by next fall. Kulshan is the native American name for Mount Baker, a well-known mountain outside of Seattle. "We'll start small and first establish a track record," he noted.

Goldman Sachs plans to hire two convertible bond arbitrage traders to expand its proprietary trading desk to London. At the moment the firm only has proprietary traders in New York, according to an official familiar with the move. He added Goldman expects to have the convertible bond prop desk up and running by year-end.

Commerzbank this week launched Sanwa Finance Co's securitisation of ¥25.4bn of unsecured Japanese consumer loans. Originally planned as a euro transaction, SF Funding One SPC was finally sold in dollars and yen after four to five weeks of marketing. Investors are wary of Japanese risk and did not respond positively to an offering from what is only the 14th largest consumer finance company in Japan.

Taiwanese dealflow got back up to speed this week as Elitegroup Computer Systems, the country's largest motherboard manufacturer during 2001, completed a $100m zero coupon deal through UBS Warburg. Elitegroup stock has tripled in value in the past year, giving the firm a market capitalisation of roughly $1.7bn.

The Hong Kong Mortgage Corp, the government agency set up to develop a secondary mortgage market, launched the first issue from its $3bn mortgage securitisation shelf last Friday. Lead manager Merrill Lynch, which had structured the Bauhinia MBS Ltd programme, found strong demand from Hong Kong banks, insurance companies and pension funds for the bonds.

Investors queued to buy Patrick Corp's 17.4m new share issue at A$14.90 per share this week through JB Were, after the company took a 50% stake in Virgin Blue, Richard Branson's Australian airline. Patrick Corp, formerly known as Lang Corp, is Australia's premier port cargo handler. The placement was initiated on Tuesday, when Patrick announced it planned to raise A$260m through a placement, underwritten at A$14.20. That was a 10% discount to Monday's closing share price of A$15.70, an all-time high for Patrick. The deal took place at A$14.90 per share, a 5.1% discount. By yesterday (Thursday) afternoonthe stock was trading at A$16.43, up 10.3% from the issue price.

Japan Retail Fund Investment Corp, the third Japanese real estate investment trust, fell 4.9% on the first day of trade on Tuesday. The units fell to ¥447,000 from their offer price of ¥470,000. In early trading, there were no bids, only sell orders. Yesterday (Thursday) afternoon, they were quoted at ¥644,000. The result is discouraging for the nascent REIT industry in Japan. In this case, the company's assets comprise four retail shopping centres with an appraised net asset value per share of ¥490,000, which should therefore leave little downside potential for the stock, especially since it has been priced with an enticing 5.8% yield in a market that boasts extremely low yields and thin spreads.

ST Assembly Test Services (Stats), Asia's second largest chip tester, raised $175m overnight in a five hour bookbuild on Wednesday through Merrill Lynch. The deal started out at $150m plus greenshoe, secured $600m of orders between 5pm and 10pm Hong Kong time and was completed at $175m plus a $25m greenshoe.

Japan Morgan Stanley was preparing the equity capital markets yesterday (Thursday) for a rare appearance from a Japanese issuer. The bank was marketing a ¥20bn EuroCB for JSAT, the satellite television enterprise that floated on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2000.

Globe Telecom and Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) are looking to repeat the success of the sovereign and launch their own international transactions in the coming weeks. The two corporates hope to take advantage of the favourable investor disposition towards the Philippines and the low interest rate environment. Globe Telecom plans to access the market in the coming weeks with a $175m-$200m 10 year issue and PLDT will follow in either April or May with a $350m-$500m transaction, which is also likely to have a 10 year tenor.

PT Medco Energi became the first Indonesian corporate to access the international fixed rate bond market in four years when it launched a $100m five year transaction this week. But observers said the B+ rated transaction had to be decreased from $150m and that it was priced with a 10.5% yield - wider than original expectations of 10% or less.