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The high-stakes game of poker between jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Russian president Vladimir Putin entered its final round last month after bailiffs seized Yukos?s core production unit and threatened to sell it off at knockdown prices. Bailiffs seized Yukos?s Yuganskneftegaz production subsidiary on July 20 to pay off a $3.4 billion tax bill, relieving Russia?s second-biggest oil company of its main cash cow. The subsidiary accounts for 70% of Yukos?s oil reserves and 60% of production. It has also contributed most of Yukos?s double-digit production growth in recent years.

With massive capital, some of the finest minds and cutting-edge technology, the bulge-bracket global securities firms offer clients a seamless one-stop service. Despite their dominance, though, cracks in the securities walls they have built remain to be exploited, as Wellington Securities is proving.

Hedge funds regularly close or return money to investors, so the decision last month by David Muschel to return capital to investors in his Jemmco fund ought to have been unexceptional. But the explanation he gave gives pause for thought. Some of the fund's strategies, he said, simply cannot perform in today's environment.

To integrate or not is the question facing Ukraine?s powerful oligarchs in the last months of president Leonid Kuchma?s 10-years in power.

Despite pockets where problems persist, privatization, consolidation, and improved risk management and regulation are bringing widespread advances in emerging market banking systems.

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The UK's financial regulator will take a dim view of companies that respond in a legalistic way to its investigations, threatening exemplary sanctions against those that don't cooperate fully.

Analyst neglect of UK small-cap and mid-cap stocks subtracts £8 billion ($14.7 billion) from the capitalization of the UK equity market, according to UK research boutique Equity Development. Comparing the valuations of stocks for which there are nil, one, two, or more than three analysts publishing research, Equity Development found discounts for neglect in 75% of the sectors for which there is useable data.

A new style of leveraged financing is set to take off in Europe as hedge funds' appetite for second-lien debt crosses the Atlantic.

Although many governments will keep pushing loose fiscal policies, capital repricing is inevitable ? probably led by the ECB. That lead should favour the euro and European bonds, at least for a while

The emergence of investable hedge fund indices has provoked a great deal of debate in the hedge fund industry, with extravagant claims being made by both proponents and detractors.

API stands for application programming interface. Sadly for linguistic purists it has become a geekspeak verb; so banks can "API into another bank" or, as one user puts it: "We just API what we need." But API matters. Crudely put, it is a method of allowing programmers to develop additional functionality to boost the capabilities of a given piece of software. It is a way for banks to retain proprietary control over off-the-shelf products, and can mean that a lesser product can rival a more expensive one after the in-house programmers have got their hands on it. Any product worth its salt in the financial technology world (and far beyond - Google, for example, offers API tools) will give its users the opportunity to build on top, thereby combining the best of both buy and build worlds.