Corporate hybrid bonds are living up to expectations of poor performance in a bearish market.

It seems no business is too small as the leading sell-side players look to increase their FX trading volumes. ABN Amro is the latest bank to join the fray.

An e-mail has been circulating, purportedly detailing certain phrases unlikely ever to be heard in any sell-side FX trading room. In no particular order, they are:

After an adverse court judgement, any attempt to revive the SEC’s 2005 ruling on hedge fund regulation looks unlikely to succeed unless a so far indifferent Congress is spurred into action.

The CIS markets offers lucrative investment opportunities despite the broader emerging markets sell-off.

Euromoney’s Global Borrowers and Investors Conference last month brought the great and the good of the world’s fixed income markets together in London for the 15th year in a row.

This year the annual UBS financial institutions’ summer conference was held in Valencia just as the football World Cup was starting.

“Enter the scotch-drinking, table-dancing, back-stabbing world of stocks and bonds.”

Hot on the heels of its highly successful $11 billion IPO in Hong Kong, mainland Chinese state-owned Bank of China is listing in Shanghai, raising an additional $2.5 billion.

Too few fund managers are paid to make asset allocation bets. That creates opportunities for those that do.

As stock exchange consolidation catches on around the world, it’s sobering to note the lessons of the Australian experience.

Foreign institutions considering an M&A foray into the financial services sector in Asia might want to pick up a copy of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ recent report on the matter before doing so.

New fund gives access to 1,353 listed companies on Shanghai and Shenzhen’s markets, compared with 118 H-share stocks and 88 red chips.

If you’re fed up with the poor performance of Asia’s equity markets recently, but still have a strong stomach for risk, consider Vietnam.

If Latin IPOs had a resurgence until a couple of months ago, so did structures that were either untried or hadn’t been used in years.

ScotiaBank, Canada’s third-largest bank, has announced its C$330 million takeover of Banco Interfin, the largest bank in Costa Rica. The two banks will merge through a public share offering, bringing ScotiaBank’s Costa Rican market share up to 13%.

Emerging markets have not responded well to the recent wobble of international stock markets. But if IPO activity can be considered as an indicator for economic expectations in a market, investors still have plenty of confidence in wide-ranging growth in Russia.

Greater liquidity is expected to flow into the Russian debt markets after the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, successfully pushed for rouble convertibility to be brought forward from January 1 2007 to July 1.

This year was shaping up to be yet another record-shattering year for Latin American IPOs but a sharp stock market correction in May and June put paid to any such hopes. Many IPOs have been cancelled over the past couple of months, and the few that have come to market have struggled out of the gate.

The first securitization of US home equity loan risk to be denominated in euros came to the market at the end of June via Countrywide Financial.

Argentina’s central bank president reckons that it will take at least another two or three years before his country’s economic variables normalize. Martin Redrado says that although Argentina has made progress since the 2001/02 financial crisis, more patience is needed before it can achieve sustainable growth.

Investors might be keen to get out of Latin American assets right now, but that doesn’t mean they’ve fallen completely out of love with Brazilian debt. The Brazilian government tried to take advantage of the turbulent markets by announcing a $4 billion tender offer in June; the offer was a spectacular failure, attracting just $1.2 billion in bids.

Alan García’s victory over Ollanta Humala in Peru’s presidential elections left Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez seething. Peruvians rejected the populist Humala, who sought to distance himself from Chávez’s anti-American rhetoric despite having received the Venezuelan leader’s uninvited backing. Chávez threw insults at García, calling him “a thief, a demagogue, a liar”. García reiterated his support for democracy and free trade, shooting back a barb of his own: “The Chávez phenomenon is militarism with a lot of money.” It is a stunning metamorphosis for the former socialist president whose first term in the 1980s ended in hyperinflation and a terror campaign by Shining Path. Nevertheless, Lima’s financial community remains worried by García’s plans to renegotiate Peru’s free trade agreement with the US.

The global strategists at Société Générale, who must be doing something right. The team rose from 24th to second place in the Extel Survey this year, knocking Smith Barney Citigroup into third place. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein took the top spot again.

In the June edition of Euromoney, our story ‘Spac probe hits wall of silence ’ contained a quote wrongly attributed to Floyd Wittlin of Bingham McCutchen. Our apologies to all concerned.

UBS for being voted the best equity research house in Europe in the Thomson Extel Survey for the sixth year in a row. The Swiss bank also got the most votes from institutional investors and sell-side rivals for European equity trading and execution.

29 the percentage of asset allocators describing themselves in Merrill Lynch’s Fund Manager Survey as overweight. The figure is one of the highest ever recorded by the survey.

Efforts to launch a CMBS index in Europe have foundered, so the proponents of the product have now decided to abandon the original project and start again.

Kuwait’s largest project financing to date closed on June 14.

Hungary’s fiscal weakness has rating agencies worried. Even before the mid-month downgrading of Hungary’s sovereign debt, Budapest’s equities markets began to adopt the same gloomy outlook as Standard & Poor’s. The government’s debt levels are on track to exceed 74% of GDP by 2009, up from 60% at current levels. High deficit spending is expected to fall just barely, overshadowing noble efforts on the part of Hungary’s socialist-liberal government to consolidate its finances. Central bankers notched up rates by 175 basis points to bolster the forint and stave off inflation risk. This, combined with a tax increase, could significantly hurt growth prospects.