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The completion last month of the first cash-settled forward trade on EU CO2 allowances is a big advance for the European emissions trading market (EU ETS). GreenStream Network (GSN) brokered the trade between counterparties Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Sampo Bank of Finland.

Small-cap companies outperformed their bigger cousins again in 2004, a trend that a joint ABN Amro and London Business School study released last month finds consistent with results over the past five years worldwide and over the past 50 years in the UK.

It has been a dismal start to Hong Kong's trading year, with the Hang Seng off 1,000 points from the year-end. As the market looks increasingly sick, even the red-hot M shares (Euromoney January 2005) drawing on Macau's casino boom have started to feel the chill, with most of them sharply down.

Foreign exchange technology is set to take another step forward when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's electronic foreign exchange (eFX) markets go live on Reuters. The agreement marks the first major linkage of sell-side traders in the interbank FX market to CME eFX futures markets, where hedge funds and other buy-side participants play a major role.

Active Asset Investment Management (aAIM) is bringing bricks and mortar to rock and roll stars with a fund that launches next month. The investment company is hoping to raise equity for a £400 million commercial property fund.

The approval of Turkey's candidature for EU membership is just the start of a decade-long process, much of which is likely to be painful, that is set to revolutionize the country's economy and society.

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Eurex US is starting to bulk up. It needs to. It has been a year since the Swiss-German derivatives exchange opened shop, and there are few external sources prepared to describe it as a success. "Eurex has lost a lot of momentum," says Russ Wasendorf, CEO of Peregrine Futures, a retail futures commission merchant in Chicago. "Perhaps there was a miscalculation on their part."

The increasing complexity of financial instruments, markets and institutions is a worry for regulators and investors. Simple, intuitive ways are needed to make risk transparent. The value-at-risk measure, although sometimes criticized on theoretical grounds (see Markus Leippold in Euromoney November 2004), has established itself as the benchmark. Christopher Lotz and Gerhard Stahl explain how regulators approach the subject of market risk management and use VaR as one among many tools.

The European High Yield Association is celebrating its fifth birthday this year under new management. Bryant Edwards, an American corporate partner in the London office of US law firm Latham & Watkins, became its new chairman last November. It has also appointed four new directors: James Amine, co-head of global leveraged finance at CSFB; Eric Cap, managing director of high-yield capital markets at JPMorgan in London; Tim Flynn, London co-head of leveraged finance at Goldman Sachs; and PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Michael Berkowitz.

Mladjan Dinkic, Serbia's 40-year-old minister of finance, says governing a country when you don't know where its borders are can be challenging. ?This is the biggest problem for us,? he says. ?It's the biggest problem for us joining the EU too.?

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