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The senior executive at a French bank leans forward urgently and semi-conspiratorially. After a wide-ranging discussion on the familiar list of hedge fund risks – excessive leverage, style drift, survivor bias in performance figures – he finally has something significant to relate.

There's not much hedge fund managers won't do to raise money and become stars – and not just in working hours.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein is offering UK retail investors a new way into hedge funds by launching the country's first certificates tracking a hedge fund index. These certificates will track the HFRX Global Index, HFR's investable index, and can be traded on the London Stock Exchange. DrKW believes that they offer retail investors an efficient and accessible way into hedge fund performance at a lower cost and for smaller amounts. "We offer daily liquidity and T+3 settlement so the trackers can be traded like equities," says Shahzad Sadique, UK head of covered warrants at DrKW.

Getting regulators to understand complex industries is hard. Insurance companies are finding it harder than most. They are concerned current accounting proposals don't reflect their basic business model, let alone regional and product differences.

Current data suggest a gradual tailing off of the house price boom is likely in OECD countries. But there's still room for a sharp decline that could fuel recession and have a serious impact on overstretched banking systems and agency lenders.

Following more than a decade of stagnation, the world's second-largest equity market has revived this year. Although the key index, the Nikkei 225, is currently flat year to date, the market has bounced back throughout the year such that at one point the index was up more than 17% from its opening levels. The encouraging performance coupled with more volatility has fuelled a recovery in Japan's IPO market that shows few signs of abating.

African economies are in a growth phase, thanks in large part to rising commodity prices. Sustained growth, though, depends on industrialization and that in turn depends on much higher levels of foreign investment. Anything near adequate funding is a long way off but there are at last encouraging signs of capital market development in some sub-Saharan countries.

Wrestling with regulation

With a history as old as the telephone itself, AT&T used to dominate US telecommunications. Now, after strategic blunders involving the disposal of key building blocks of business growth, its rump looks like a bite-sized takeover target. It might even have to sell at a discount to today's price.

www.breakingviews.com

When Diageo offloaded its US Pillsbury food division to General Mills for stock in 2001, it did not expect still to be the biggest shareholder in General Mills three years later. But as pressure mounted to dispose of the stake, poor performance at Pillsbury, SEC investigations into General Mills and the overhang of the Diageo block held back the share price. It took an exceptionally well-structured and well-executed deal to overcome these obstacles last month.