Takeover of partner Synthesis Bank is central to planned expansion into wealth management.

"Once you get a contract, unless you screw it up, you get the renewal"

A year ago, fund managers and analysts were confidently predicting as many as seven landmark IPOs on Vietnam’s stock exchanges in 2007, raising as much as $1 billion each.

Barclays Capital is further expanding its equity origination business with the appointment of William Ortner from Citi to its New York office as managing director in equity product origination. Ortner is the latest of several new hires that Barcap has made this year to its equity origination business. He was most recently a managing director responsible for corporate equity derivatives at Citi.

Calyon’s management uncovered a large position of credit indices in its New York office’s proprietary trading desk last month. The bank said positions were largely built at the end of August and were above internal limits. Calyon said appropriate disciplinary action had been taken and controls strengthened to prevent any repeat. The losses, following a winding down of the positions, were €250 million.

Buried deep in the announcement of Morgan Stanley’s third-quarter earnings results was a substantial hit from the bank’s newly built hedge funds business.

Rumours that RBC Capital Markets had let go up to 40 sales and trading officials in the US were firmly denied by officials at the Canadian bank, who refused to comment on possible redundancies.

UBS has continued the revamping of its European debt capital markets business instigated by Roberto Isolani – who became head of fixed-income capital markets, for EMEA and APAC, at the start of this year.

Goldman Sachs knows how to spot an opportunity.

After the crash, here comes CASH

As volatility spreads across the debt markets, the CMBS market is taking stock. Property derivatives are likely to increase volatility in the market and contribute to spread widening just as refinancing activity – a significant driver of CMBS volumes – slows. But as competition between commercial lenders and conduit lenders expands across Europe, the market is looking to new jurisdictions to maintain growth.

"Interest rate cuts will be like Viagra – an artificial stimulus that doesn’t cure the underlying problem"

Oanda is an anomaly among the many trading platforms that offer retail FX.

CMBS conduit lenders in Europe might be forced to return to the market to shed inventory.

Dresdner Kleinwort has hired Vasily Kirpichev as managing director and head of client coverage for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Formerly head of investment banking at Vneshtorgbank, Kirpichev will be responsible for origination across M&A, equity, debt and other areas. Based in Moscow he will report to both Berent Wallendahl, global head of client coverage in London and Igor Lojevsky, chairman of global banking and capital markets, Russia and CIS in Moscow.

The first European bank to be cleared to use one of the new Basle Accord’s advanced approaches – and reap the rewards – is not headquartered in London, Paris, or Frankfurt. It doesn’t inhabit a gleaming tower in Milan or a grand old office block in Madrid. Strictly speaking, it’s not even a bank. Duncan Wood reports.

Absolute Capital Management is restructuring five of its equity hedge funds following the departure of co-chief executive officer Florian Homm, which prompted in excess of $100 million of redemption requests for funds with up to $530 million invested in illiquid US stocks quoted on over-the-counter bulletin boards. Chief executive Jonathan Treacher calls the affair "a significant distraction".

Intervention did the trick, to an extent.

Flotation gives big boost to Zagreb market.

The fallout from sub-prime worries in the US has cast a pall over the equity issuance plans of Russian companies in the wake of the volatility that rocked global stock markets over the summer.

Growth highest in Russia and the CIS.

The developments will heat up the battle between Qatar and Dubai to become the Middle East’s financial centre.

Lebanon’s economy is crumbling. Its public debt is breaking new world records. It has been teetering on the brink of civil war for the past 10 months. But none of this has stopped Dubai-based Shuaa Capital, one of the Middle East’s leading investment banks, opening a branch this September in Beirut. Why?

A prolonged liquidity contraction is irrevocable, whatever happens in the spuriously autonomous real economy.

Cash management is a hugely attractive business for the banks that have ended up at the top of the consolidation pile, with earnings stability and high returns on equity. And despite reductions in activity because of such developments as the Single Euro Payments Area, new business is emerging in white-labelled products and financial supply chain management. Laurence Neville reports.

As the loan market revives, both buyers and sellers are struggling to establish the upper hand.

Investors may have learnt the lesson that bonds aren’t supposed to provide equity-like returns.

More on CLS from The weeklyFiX

The industry collectively did not cover itself in glory during the August/September correction. But there is now a rich environment for a wide range of strategies, says Nick Evans, editor of EuroHedge.

Authoritative Triennial Central Bank Survey confirms FX volumes have grown at an astonishing rate.

Corporate market emerges from intensive care.

In the light of the troubled times the covered bond market has found itself in, the European Covered Bond Council has proposed to establish an emergency committee.

Pfandbrief issuers were notable by their absence as the covered bond market descended into chaos.

Write-downs in the leveraged loan market can raise more questions than they answer.

Opportunities are growing for distressed debt and equity investors in the region despite record levels of private equity fundraising.

Northern Rock’s Granite master trust did launch a deal in September – but Granite Master Issuer 2007-3 was a far cry from what the market had been expecting just a matter of months ago.

Just over a year on from the initial launch of its marketindex platform in Germany (see Euromoney July 2006), ABN Amro has decided to enter the highly competitive UK retail market. The bank launched marketindex, which is white-labelled from Oanda, in mid-September. The platform provides streaming two-way prices in various currencies, equity indices, commodities and bonds. For legal reasons, these are designated as contracts for difference (CFDs), although in reality there is very little difference from trading the underlying cash products. ABN Amro will act as counterparty to all trades, although all prices are sources directly from Oanda.

The credit crunch has made life especially difficult for the credit portfolio managers charged with hedging commercial banks’ massive corporate loan portfolios. Lack of liquidity in credit default swaps and the closure of the CLO market has greatly reduced their arsenal of hedging tools. It’s not all bad news though. Wild market conditions have underscored the importance of actively hedging loan books and served to justify portfolio management groups’ existence to banks’ top management.

It’s not often that you can walk onto a trading floor and are greeted by England cricket legend Mike Atherton, twinkle toes Mark Ramprakash, champion jockey Frankie Dettori and Olympics silver medallist boxer Amir Khan.

After what could be described as a difficult conception and then arduous labour, foreign exchange settlement system CLS has gone on to thrive in the first five years of its life. Lee Oliver reports.

A senior Citi official in Latin America says that Brazil’s leading local banks will remain independent despite rumours that foreign banks, including Citi itself, could be sizing up a potential acquisition. One banker in São Paulo told Euromoney recently that he reckoned that Brazil’s three big local banks – Bradesco, Itaú and Unibanco – could become targets for global banks, such as Citi, as they bid to increase their presence in Latin America’s most important market.

Firms rushing to set up credit opportunity funds might already be too late.

The world’s stock and futures exchanges have benefited handsomely from equity market uncertainty.

Ecopetrol, the Colombian state-owned oil company, is expected to issue up to $2 billion-worth of ADR shares, most likely on the New York Stock Exchange next year, according to investment bankers.

Leading players in Argentine capital markets say the government must issue a trailblazing Eurobond or global bond if the markets are to take off. The country’s financial markets are more than 20 times smaller than those of Brazil, despite Brazil’s GDP ($1.17 trillion) being less than five times greater than Argentina’s ($250 billion).

Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, announced in September that his country would expand its petrochemicals industry during the next five years, lifting annual revenues to $100 billion. Chávez said that by 2013, after an investment of $20 billion, the industry will have created 700,000 jobs, 10 times the number employed at state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela. On September 23, the president started a "petrochemicals revolution", which will require 87 plants around the country to produce primary materials and petrochemicals-based products such as fertilizers, plastics and cosmetics. Chávez expects these moves to increase petrochemicals royalties to the government from $340 million this year to $20 billion in 2013.

A long-standing contact gets in touch with a Euromoney journalist via letter.

The allure of private equity to senior banking figures is well documented: why run a business for a bank when you can run a fund for yourself?

When China’s leading state-run banks lined up to announce their sub-prime exposure in late August, it was surprising and disconcerting.

It seems as if the sub-prime market implosion might have roots deep in the proverbial mists of time.

"If you speak only one language, you are an American."

Barclays Global Investors has appointed Karen Prooth, previously a managing director at JPMorgan Asset Management, as managing director and European chief operating officer for iShares, the company’s exchange-traded funds business, and GIMG (Global Index and Markets Group), which covers a number of businesses from equity index products to securities lending. She will be responsible for coordinating the operations, technology and finance functions for the businesses and reports to Rory Tobin, chief executive of iShares and GIMG Europe.

The ADR has been a very important equity market tool for many years. So long in fact that in 2007 the instrument celebrates its 80th birthday. Apparently, the ADR was invented by John Pierpont Morgan, Jr when his friend and fellow American, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the owner of Selfridges, one of London’s most renowned retail stores, asked him to develop a way for Selfridges shares to be sold in New York. Morgan’s good deed for a friend turned into a very profitable line of work, and one that JPMorgan still holds the top spot in. Now the only question that remains is how exactly JPMorgan is planning to commemorate this momentous year.

Could problems in the UK inter-bank market have been avoided?

Bankers fear new requirements could prove costly.

Credit Suisse has appointed Michael Fouad Chahine as global head of Islamic banking distribution. The bank is expanding its platform to distribute Shariah-compliant products. Chahine, who will be based in Dubai, will coordinate the existing Islamic banking businesses across Credit Suisse’s investment banking, private banking and asset management divisions to build a distribution centre in Dubai. Chahine has been with Credit Suisse since 2000. Most recently he was head of strategic initiatives in Dubai.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the trade group for the over-the-counter derivatives market, has launched an all-encompassing equity derivatives protocol, called the Isda Equity MCA Protocol, that the organization says constitutes a "significant step in a program to enhance operational efficiency in the equity derivatives markets internationally".

Hedge funds are supposed to perform well when mainstream markets are falling: that’s when their capacity to go short and their managers’ selection skills have the best chance to outperform long-only managers that do no better than replicate the index. That’s when they earn their two and 20. At least, so the theory has it.

The recent rise of shareholder activism, particularly from the hedge fund sector, has not been universally welcome. But should politicians and regulators step in, or should the market police itself?