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Lehman Brothers is recommending investors sell U.S. dollar calls against the Taiwan dollar to take advantage of anticipated further weakening of the Asian currency. "The Taiwan dollar has hit post-crisis lows," said Ronald Leven, currency strategist at Lehman in Tokyo. However, further downside is limited as the central bank likely will intervene to halt a wholesale sell off. Lehman suggests selling a one-month U.S. dollar call struck at TWD33.70. The Taiwan currency was trading in the spot market at TWD33.45 on Thursday. Implied volatility stood at 3% for the one-month call option versus a historical level of 2.5%.

OTCex, a Paris-based equity derivatives broker formed by professionals from BNP Paribas and Fimat, has attracted 22 members and notched up 610 transactions since going live six months ago with an approach that blends on line and traditional voice brokering. Colin Jolly, coo, said the firm offers delta-neutral equity options on the German, Swiss, French, U.K., Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Belgian listed equity markets. Despite the popularity of the Internet some 90% of the transactions OTCex handles are closed by voice brokers at the firm, he noted. "It takes time to change habits," he said. "In the standard inter-dealer broker market people are used to dealing by phone," he continued.

Citigroup, which recently went live with a Web-based institutional trading platform for banks and brokers in Europe, plans to roll the system out in Asia, the U.S. and Latin America and will expand its product range to include derivatives, according to Financial NetNews, a sister publication to DW.

Credit Suisse First Boston in Tokyo has hired Vaibhav Piplapure, associate director, credit derivatives structuring at Barclays Capital. Piplapure takes the new position of v.p., structured products, and reports to Paul Kuo, head of fixed income, according to a spokesman. The structured products group has recently added Takashi Nakanishi, a fixed income professional at Goldman Sachs, to head up the team (DW, 5/7). The spokesman declined to comment on whether CSFB plans additional hires. Kuo and Piplapure could not be reached for comment.

Deutsche Bank has hired Katzu Ashizawa, head of equity derivatives at Morgan Stanley in Tokyo, to head up its equity division. Ashizawa will take responsibility for cash, sales, trading, derivatives and research in the equity division. This position has been vacant for some time and have been covered in the interim by John Macfarlane, chief country officer in Tokyo, according to a spokeswoman. Macfarlane and Ashizawa could not be reached for comment.

General Re Financial Products has hired Bjorn Flesaker, senior managing director-head of derivatives research and front office systems at Bear Stearns in New York, in the new position of global head of research and analytics. Flesaker referred calls to Mark Byrne, ceo, who did not return calls. Flesaker spent over five years at Bear Stearns, having joined from the then Union Bank of Switzerland (DW, 1/15/96) and prior to that was at Merrill Lynch.

Elektrizitätswerk Dahlenburg has entered a precipitation swap with Element Reinsurance in which the electric utility receives a pay out if precipitation rises above an agreed level during the summer. Rainfall has a direct impact on Elektrizitätswerk Dahlenburg's revenue because many of the utility's customers are farmers using electric power for irrigation during periods of low rainfall. The swap is designed to hedge against a fall in revenue during periods of high precipitation, according to Nicholas Ward, head of new markets at Spectron, which brokered the transaction. Ward declined to detail the size of the deal.

TheInternational Swaps and Derivatives Association over the next several weeks will canvass credit derivative dealers, hedgers and investors with a view to revising so-called 'soft' credit event definitions in credit derivative documentation. Bob Pickel, executive director and ceo of ISDA in New York, told DW there will be changes to the credit event definitions, declining to put a timeframe on the move. The issue has been a focus of discussion as the synthetic CDO and credit default swap markets have grown but raised eyebrows recently when Moody's Investors Service and Deutsche Bank engaged in a skirmish--via conflicting research reports--on the potential magnitude and probability of soft credit events, according to market professionals.

Ronald Neumunz, head of a specialized team marketing fixed income, foreign exchange and derivative products in emerging markets to hedge funds and private banks at J.P. Morgan Chase in London, has joined investment consultant LJH Global Investments in London. Neumunz takes the new position of managing director, heading up the firm's first European operation.