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Marcus Browning has resigned from Citi, where he recently took up a new role to build a proprietary team to trade volatility. He is believed to be headed for a position on the buy side. "We are disappointed to see Marcus leave, he has been a profitable trader for us and he has been instrumental in building FX options into the strong business that it is today at Citi. But we understand that he has long harboured a desire to work on the buy side, and we wish him success in the future," says James Bindler, global FX options head at Citi.

Fitch’s proposed new methodology will tighten CDO ratings, and Moody’s is considering abolishing its current ratings scale altogether.

Reserve managers are unlikely to suddenly adjust foreign currency holdings and latest IMF data suggest they will not chase the euro higher.

Distressed seems the right route to take.

Icap has announced that it has upgraded its EBS spot FX platform, making it faster and adding enhancements. The company says that as a result, global deal times on the platform are now 75% faster than they were a year ago. Intra-regional deals are-now completed on average in five to eight milliseconds.

Saxo Bank has promoted Tobias Straessle, who was chief information officer, to chief operating officer. The bank has also promoted Claus Nielsen to the new role of chief operating officer for trading. Saxo says Nielsen’s promotion reflects a change in its structure and will help to ensure coordination between all of the bank’s growing list of services. As a replacement for Nielsen, Saxo has hired industry veteran Steve "Wham" Braithwaite as its director, global head of foreign exchange and fixed income. The bank has also appointed two new spot dealers, Steve Bellamy, who joins from JPMorgan, and Matt Strand, who was at Bank of America.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Japanese reputation for electronic gadgetry, Japanese institutional equity investors are embracing electronic trading in a big way, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates.

Richard D’Albert, global head of the securitized product group and CDOs at Deutsche Bank is not to become global head of the institutional client group at the European bank after all. Euromoney heard that D’Albert was taking on the global sales role Jim Turley’s decision to take a sabbatical.

Since launching in 2007, Chi-X, the pan-European multilateral trading facility run by Nomura’s Instinet, has made notable inroads into the market for trading German stocks, regularly trading more than 15% of the daily turnover of blue-chip companies such as BASF. At the same time, however, Xetra, Deutsche Börse’s order book, has increased its market share of domestic trading to a record 99%.

Far from turning a corner in 2008, the market looks set for a few tough months yet.

A report by EDHEC says funds of hedge funds returned more than 10% in 2007 on average, compared with just 3.53% for the S&P 500 and 4.14% for the Lehman Global US Treasury Bond index. The best-performing strategy last year in single managers was emerging markets. All strategies produced positive returns, although a majority suffered a slight fall-off in performance on 2006.

The UK Financial Services Authority has questioned the spread of derivatives-based trading strategies, such as 130/30, by traditional long-only managers. The increasing use of derivatives poses a "range of risks", warns the FSA.