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Directors of actively-managed exchange traded funds will be required to combine the talents of a regular ETF director and mutual fund director. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued orders last month for the funds to launch and it has already approved applications for actively managed ETFs from Bear Stearns Asset Management, PowerShares Capital Management, Barclays Global Investors and WisdomTree Investments.

If you thought that banks had already recuperated off-balance sheet vehicles, think again. Variable Interest Entities, an Enron device, have yet to play out with the downgrading of monolines.

Russell Investments is set to launch global style equity indexes to reflect key growth and value segments of the Russell Global Index.

Stephen Nelson, CEO of BAA, is resigning from his role, which is said to be a reaction to widespread complaints over UK airports. His replacement is Colin Mathews, the former CEO of Severn Trent. But in addition to trying to turnaround the UK’s infrastructure company he faces continued uncertainty over the financing put in place by Ferrovial. Read Euromoney’s groundbreaking report, published a year ago, which first exposed the huge problems that the refinancing faced.

There is public and political pressure to keep out or at least regulate sovereign wealth funds. It must be resisted

I'm consistently surprised by how little the mainstream press understands securitisation. Admittedly it's not the easiest concept to get one's head around, with its alien terms and acronyms. What an SPV is, and where it is, can be hard to explain.

One of the reasons suggested for the latest bout of sterling weakness is the nationalization of Northern Rock. US investors in particular are said to have been spooked by the pictures of people queuing to withdraw their funds in panic when the crisis broke and now won’t touch UK assets with a bargepole. Given the US sub-prime mess, though, you have to wonder how sound their judgement is.

Saxo has extended the streaming of live option prices to its clients in the US after what it says has been a successful roll-out in Europe and Asia. The bank will offer 31 currency pairs, with maturities of one day to one year.

So Thomson Corporation’s takeover of Reuters has been rubberstamped by US and European regulators after the companies agreed to sell off some of their databases. The deal creates an absolutely huge data-vending and financial-information provider.

I was surprised at just how much press coverage there was last week when it came out that Global Trader Europe had effectively been holed below the waterline because of one client’s inability to meet a margin call. However, having been told from an exceptionally good source that the client was a character well known both to the market and the UK’s Financial Services Authority, I think I now understand why there was so much interest. So far, I haven’t seen the name published other than on a few bulletin boards, which have been swift to remove it.

Since I’ve been ranting – sorry, I mean offering my informed commentary about the wonderful world of FX – I like to think that I have helped improve the standard of puff and PR that is routinely sent out. But this week I got one of the worst press releases I’ve seen for some time about a retail platform that, “experienced the highest volumes of trading during January 2008 since its launch.” It went on to say, “nearly half of all trades executed during January...were Euro/USD transactions, compared to an average of 15% in the three months prior to August’s credit crunch of 2007.”

K Duker, who many years ago had the pleasure of managing me at Midland New York, has finally left Deutsche. He held numerous different positions at the bank over the course of many years. His last role was as head of dbFX, the bank’s retail platform, for Asia. Duker was instrumental in signing the deal with FXCM, the white-label partner that Deutsche never mentions.