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But cheer up – things might get better later in 2008.

AQR Capital, a super quant house with about $36 billion in assets under management in quantitative strategies, is having a bad spell. The $4 billion Absolute Return fund lost almost 6% in November, putting it down almost 12% for the year. Given the losses, it is unlikely that the firm will undertake an IPO in the near future, as was once expected. "The year 2007 is going to go down in history as the one that quants want to forget," says a hedge fund manager.

State Street has launched a private equity index that will enable private equity investors to evaluate their performance against their peers.

The global credit crunch has underlined to banks the importance of cash management and transaction banking as core businesses.

Investors search for regional opportunities.

NYSE Arca and the Chicago Board Options Exchange have decided to close trading for options on exchange-traded funds 15 minutes earlier to synchronize the timing with the close of trading of the underlying assets. Arca last month decided to move up the closing time for ETFs to 4 p.m. Eastern time, to better accommodate after-hours trading and coordinate daily value reporting with fund managers’ daily asset value calculations. Arca is one of the largest marketplaces for ETFs, attracting 128 listings in 2008 alone. CBOE is following in Arca’s footsteps because it trades a large variety of ETF options, and wanted to synchronize its trading with the prevailing marketplace. About 50 options classes are affected.

Despite reeling from billions of dollars of losses in the US sub-prime mortgage markets, Citi is looking to expand its franchise in the high-growth Russian banking market. Bill Mills, chairman of Citi markets and banking for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, recently announced that the US bank would open new offices in Kazan, Perm, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Omsk and Novosibirsk in 2008-09. Since 2002, the bank has opened more than 60 offices in Russia, including outlets in Moscow, Nizhni Novgorod, Samara, Rostov-on-Don, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg.

Growth in Latin American high-net-worth assets continues to outstrip that of other countries as the local economies boom. Helen Avery asks the region’s top-ranking private banks how they have been reacting to burgeoning demand.

Moody’s increased the pressure on some monoline guarantors last month by placing two firms, FGIC and XLCA, on review for possible downgrade from their triple-A ratings. MBIA and FGIC’s outlook has changed to negative and Ambac, Assured Guarantee, FSA and Radian are on stable outlook. In a brief conference call, in which the agency refused to make public the capital shortfalls of the firms, it stated that further changes are unlikely while the firms address their capital-raising plans, a process likely to take "some months".

A bull-market product that would crash and burn in the event of a credit crisis: that was the view that many critics held of perpetual bonds – a fundraising instrument that has been all the rage in the region in recent years.

Trading activity quadruples in November but widening spreads on small caps becomes a concern for investors.

On Wall Street the backstabbing has started, and with good reason – bonus season has arrived. While Latin American bankers watched their counterparts in the structured finance world write down billions of dollars in losses, they, by contrast, quietly brought in good profits.