Lex van Dam, the trader who risked $1m of his own money in the TV show Million Dollar Traders to prove that anyone can play the stock market, is opening his own online Trading Academy this week.

US group Walter Energy is in talks to buy Western Coal Corp, its Canadian peer and AIM's largest company, for $3.3bn in a bid to cash in on growing Asian demand for coal.

Europe's lawmakers have approved new rules ushering in pan-European regulation for hedge and private equity funds for the first time.

Let's say this for the credit crisis: it has at least given Hollywood executives some new inspiration for movies. There have already been a string of films prompted by the crisis – not least the long-awaited follow-up to Wall Street – and now Al Pacino wants in on the act. Variety reports he's been lined up to play a dodgy hedge fund manager in Arbitrage, which will begin shooting next year. We're looking forward to it already.

In a lively credit-crunch satire, Paul Torday reprises the comic voice of his successful debut Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

Changes to Takeover Panel rules are set to make hostile bids more difficult in the wake of Kraft's controversial £11.6bn buyout of Cadbury. The panel's updated code aims to redress imbalances giving hostile bidders a "tactical advantage" and making it too easy for hostile bids to succeed, the City regulator said yesterday.

James Caan, for one, is pleased with the Chancellor's spending review. "Nobody likes to see spending cuts but the Government has to make savings, just as every businessman has to," the Dragon's Den tycoon says. Still, might the cuts have been lower, were it not for wealthy businessmen choosing to become non-doms, depriving the UK of tax revenues? What does co-Dragon Duncan Bannatyne think about Caan's non-dom status now, we wonder?

Happy landings, Paul Cable: the insurance broker to the stars will have to seek new opportunities after the Financial Services Authority kicked him out of the industry for two years and fined him £89,000. His crime? On behalf of Media & Entertainment Insurance Services he was asked to arrange two insurance contracts for a client in an "area of business that was outside Cable's usual area of expertise". The FSA says he inflated the cost of the premiums and falsified documents with the aim of overcharging the client. Plus ça change for the entertainment industry, really.

Obsession with economic growth and the greed of financial speculators are destroying efforts to conserve the world's diminishing resources.

A gaggle of hedge funds and banks led by Och Ziff and Lloyds Banking Group, are gearing up for a sale of Sitex Orbis, a vacant property security firm.

The hedge fund manager with the Midas touch?

Russian officers leading a discredited investigation into a British-based hedge fund have switched their inquiries to London, threatening to provoke a diplomatic row.

The sprawling Anglo-South African financial conglomerate Old Mutual has sold its US life insurance business in a drive to simplify its structure.