Restrictions hindering participation by foreign institutional investors (FIIs) in India's burgeoning equity derivatives market are slowly being lifted. The Indian finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram announced in his budget speech in late February that FIIs can offer stocks instead of cash as collateral to trade in equity derivatives. That permits FIIs to put their holdings of Indian stock, worth over Rs34 billion ($777 million) in total, to use, and allows them to participate in a bigger way in the derivatives market. Putting up stocks instead of cash as collateral will help reduce the cost of arbitrage between the cash and futures markets, an area where foreign institutional investors are particularly active, says Mahesh Bhagwat, vice president at ICICI Securities, a large brokerage. Those opportunities for arbitrage have been profitable over the past year when futures have generally traded at a premium to prices in the cash market, he points out. "Even though prices of stocks FIIs hold have doubled over the last year, putting them in profit in the cash market, they must pay higher cash margins on their positions in the futures market," Bhagwat explains.

Now enjoying the third year of a recovery that is clearing away the debris of the 2001 crisis, Turkey's bankers are hoping soon to complete the final important clean-up operation: resolving the on-again, off-again fate of the fourth-largest private bank, Yapi Kredi.

Definitions for: Naked short selling; Illegal naked short selling; Stock borrow programme; Fail to deliver; Margin account stock; Market maker; OTC Bulletin Board; Pink Sheets; DTCC; NSCC; Freiverkehr; Regulation SHO; Threshold Securities List; NASD Rule 3370.

Growing liquidity derived from high oil prices, less restrictive regulation, a drive to privatization and a reduction in investment abroad have driven the Saudi Arabian stock market to new heights

Ukraine is enjoying a huge re-evaluation in the eyes of outsiders, thanks to its Orange Revolution. President Viktor Yushchenko has set out an ambitious and investor-friendly reform programme but it is not clear that the government is capable of implementing it.

Thousands of US stocks are being traded on a little-known Berlin exchange, without the knowledge of many of the companies involved. Have the naked short sellers exported their practice overseas?

Having recorded a loss of €1.5 billion in 2001 and been bought out by Permira in 2003, pay-TV operator Premiere has now completed the most successful IPO of a Germany company since 2000

Germany's Pfandbrief issuers are getting ready for the new law that comes into effect in July. Now they, potential new issuers and an increasingly diverse investor base are focusing on the opportunities that the revised regulatory regime may provide. Will the new legislation help to hasten the internationalisation of the asset class?

It is hard to see how Paul Wolfowitz will be able to run the World Bank, at least in his first couple of years there. His only supporters seem to be people who think the Bank is in need of a radical shake-up. That, however, is the last thing the Bank needs: it is only now recovering from years of turmoil at the beginning of the tenure of Wolfowitz's predecessor, James Wolfensohn. But Wolfowitz comes from a US administration (where he is currently deputy secretary of defence) that has been very unhappy with the Bank, and he has surely been charged with changing things.

Kazakhstan's banking system is a success story whose rapid growth brings a need for capital injections, hence growing foreign interest. But while the banks are operationally transparent, ownership is opaque. What's more, a small population might limit foreign participation beyond investment banking.

Paul Wolfowitz's controversial nomination as World Bank president is overshadowing valedictory verdicts on James Wolfensohn's 10 years in the role.

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Bear Stearns's young UK subprime lender has entered the RMBS market using an innovative offering circular that should position it well for future deals.

With some of the largest and most liquid capital markets in Asia Pacific and yield-hungry local asset managers, Australia would seem a natural port of call for Asian companies. Yet until structural reforms are made and local perceptions about Asian risk change, the expectations gap will not be bridged. Australia will end up the loser.

The SEC has amended legislation in a belated effort to clamp down on naked short selling. But it remains under pressure from a lobby group that ranges from senators to lawyers, and management to shareholders, who believe the new rules are having little effect.

Successful foreign involvement in Brazilian investment banking demands some sort of venture with one of the local firms that dominate the market. Banco Pactual is among the most successful of these and Goldman Sachs seems to have recognized this.

The successful restructuring of energy company Medco shows what can be achieved in the byzantine and often murky world of Indonesian restructurings. With creditors all paid out and the family back in control, plans are afoot for a rapid expansion and an overseas listing.

Shareholders and executives in some of the US's smallest listed companies believe their share prices have been forced down by illegal naked shorting. This has led to a number of lawsuits, claiming unscrupulous behaviour by brokers and market-makers exploiting loopholes in the central clearing system. Those implicated dismiss the allegations as rubbish. What's going on?

With the Russian state rolling back the liberalization of the economy – notably in its dealings with oil company Yukos – investment banks are faced with a dilemma. They must sometimes decide between defending the rights of private investors and forging and maintaining relations with the Kremlin in the hope of attracting current and future business. It's a tough choice.

Modular rather than maintenance seems to be the new buzzword as the key to success in a rapidly changing environment for credit research. But every investment bank seems to have a different view about the implications for analysts. To publish or not to publish? Cross asset or sectoral? Client facing or in house? Whatever the decision, only the best analysts will survive.

Before 1992, David Gershon didn't know the difference between bonds and equities, so to have set up a company that revolutionized the pricing of currency options less than a decade later is no mean feat. Gershon left school with the dream of becoming a professor of physics and spent most of his twenties gaining a number of impressive academic accolades. His PhD was in superstring theory. "This theory was first developed in 1981. It gained popularity throughout the 1980s as the first theory that could unify all the forces in nature, which is why it is sometimes called the theory of everything," he says. "It's a beautiful idea but unfortunately to me it looked like it was reaching a dead end with its ambitious role to 'replace the need in God'. It had too many unknowns and ambiguities." While writing his thesis, Gershon completed an MBA and began increasingly to think about finance. Eventually, he decided to switch disciplines and joined the graduate programme of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Very quickly he started to get offers to do consultancy work, one of which took him to the mortgages department of NationsBank. Soon after, he received job offers from Wall Street firms and he moved to New York in 1994. "At the time there was a fair amount of demand for people with experience in mathematics and physics," he says. Gershon then traded FX at Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital, covering emerging markets. He later transferred to Barclays' head office in London, where he was global head of FX options. In 2000, he left Barclays and set up SuperDerivatives. "SuperDerivatives' initial mission, which remains its aim today, was to help thousands of people already and potentially involved in options to obtain real market prices rather than just theoretical values," he says.