Credit default swaps
The CME Icebreaker
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched a clearing service for credit default swaps on December 15, with several major dealers and buy-side firms as founding members. Will it capture market share from rival IntercontinentalExchange? By Alastair Marsh
Pricing and hedging basket credit derivatives in the Gaussian copula
The static assumptions of the Gaussian copula model have long presented an obstacle to dynamic hedging of credit portfolio tranches. Here, Jean-David Fermanian and Olivier Vigneron combine the copula with a spread diffusion to derive hedging error as…
Lessons in simplicity
The mood at the fifth Structured Products Europe conference in London was distinctly retrospective, as speakers and delegates spent two days dissecting their business practice with a readiness that suggests the industry has learnt from its mistakes and…
CDS tested to the limit
Auctions to settle credit default swaps on media firm Thomson in October tested both the small bang protocol and the nerves of dealers. The outcome puzzled some market participants, while others have called for the removal of restructuring as a credit…