Swap Default Funds at the CME & LCH

CME this week changed their minimum contribution to the default fund.  My initial reaction was that this change was designed to encourage smaller firms to self-clear their IRS business.  It got me investigating default funds and the entire financial safeguards at CME and LCH in more detail. Default Waterfall After reading through the CME rule […]

Post-Trade Transparency in CDS Index

The recent IOSCO report on Post-Trade Transparency in the Credit Default Swap Market, certainly makes  interesting reading and in this blog I will provide a short summary of the report as well as looking in more depth at the data now available for CDS Index. IOSCO Report The report focus is on regulatory systems that mandate disclosure of […]

BRL Interest Rate Swaps

The CME are due to begin clearing Brazilian Real interest rate swaps by the end of August 2015.  I thought it worthwhile to uncover what we can see in the data prior to their launch. What is a BRL Swap? BRL swaps have a few peculiarities.  Let’s have a brief look at the characteristics: Fixed […]

Boole Conferences Cork, Ireland, 2015

In 2015, University College Cork (UCC) celebrates the bicentenary of George Boole, 1815-64. Boole was appointed the first Professor of Mathematics at the University in 1849. To mark the bicentenary a series of international mathematical conferences, collectively referred to as the Boole Conferences 2015, are being held in Cork. Theme 7: Mathematical Modelling in Post-Crisis […]

USD OIS Swap Volumes

One of our more popular posts is Gary’s Feb 2014 article on Fed Fund Swap Nuances, so I thought it would be interesting to look into What the Data Shows for these products. First the highlights: USD OIS is the third-largest IR product $1 trillion gross notional was traded in July 2015 in the US […]

A Macro Look At OTC Clearing Data

We spend a lot of time analyzing IRS clearing activity for CME and LCH, primarily because it is close to home and about as much of a fist fight as we are going to see in swaps. But what about the rest of the world?  There are 14 clearing houses that we monitor for OTC […]

Quantitative Finance ‘GoodReads’

Two reading lists of books relevant to quantitative finance are provided using the GoodReads platform. Often I am asked to recommend good books to help a student, colleague or customer get a better grasp of quantitative finance. Instead of ad-hoc and incomplete lists, I thought it might be useful (especially for me) to have a […]