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Speculation about Instinet Group's future has heated up again recently. Equities trading has not been an easy business to make money in during the past three years as investors looked for ways to cut their costs. Independent specialist brokers such as Instinet found it particularly tough.

The London Stock Exchange might be willing to countenance merger discussions once again with Deutsche Börse, but it is not content to stand idly by while the Swiss Exchange (SWX) tries to poach its lucrative Eurobond business.

HSBC is going ?carbon neutral.? It plans to plant trees, buy green electricity and trade emission allowances to abate its contribution to the release of greenhouse gas.

Hong Kong's LINK REIT juggernaut rolled into town last month. The $2.7 billion IPO of the local Housing Authority's portfolio of retail outlets and car parks, packaged as a real estate investment trust and lead managed by Goldman Sachs, HSBC and UBS, LINK was the world's largest REIT.

If you want stock markets to rise, simply supply the City with more booze. Stocks and shares website ADVFN says that in 16 of the last 20 Decembers the FTSE 100 has gone up, and the month has been responsible for 25% of whatever rises there have been in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1930.

The equity market is dull and M&A patchy but private equity is on fire. Barely a week goes by without a landmark deal. What is especially striking is the amounts private-equity houses have been able to pay for their targets. And that is a function of how much they have been able to borrow.

Poland's once-beleaguered banks are posting profit growth for 2004 as high as 400% in some cases. Banks are now hungry to increase market share via acquisitions. But who at the table is prepared to cash in their chips? Julian Evans reports.

Inflation differentials between countries are returning and investment analysts will reinvent the technology for weighing them. First in the balance will be the US whose assets look set to weigh light against those of Europe and Japan

In a bold but reckless ploy, for much of last year Russia's president Vladimir Putin sought to curb the appreciation of the rouble against the dollar by intervening in the market. But the strategy, designed to protect domestic producers against growing imports, backfired. Along with inflation, capital outflows revived, sparking off the mini liquidity crisis that hit several banks in the summer. Ben Aris reports.

In 2004 equity deals for smaller companies were much more lucrative for investment banks than large block trades, which were often disasters from a profit point of view. Heavy competition for deals, with league table positions strongly in mind, helped kept discounts tight. In volatile markets, banks proved willing to cut their own throats in pursuit of ill-paid privatization transactions. Peter Koh reports

War-torn Colombia has enjoyed a good run in the past two years and given bondholders a lot to cheer about. But now investors are asking if popular president Alvaro Uribe will be able to keep the outlook bright in 2005. Last year Colombian spreads narrowed a sizeable 90 basis points to about 340bp over US treasuries, generating more than 10% in total returns, several notches above the market as a whole. Uribe's success in pushing the country's Marxist guerrillas into retreat after four decades of internal conflict has cut kidnapping and terrorist attacks, boosted business confidence and helped attract investment. Those gains have translated into economic growth of almost 4% in 2003, the highest rate in nearly a decade, and paved the way for a repeat

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