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| {{freeessay|isda|tail events|}}{{d|Tail event||n|}} | | {{freeessay|isda|tail events|{{image|Tail event|jpg|}}}} |
| {{L1}}'''Statistics''': Of a range of possible independent events, one whose frequency is three or more [[Normal distribution|standard deviation]]s from the mean. An event with a low [[probability]]. <li>
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| '''Work life''': An unwanted outcome you didn’t expect, to which you weren’t paying attention, and, therefore, for which you don’t think you should be blamed.
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| </Ol>
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| A market, in the abstract, looks like a [[nomological machine]]. There is a bounded environment, a finite trading day, a limited number of market participants and financial instruments regarding which one can engage in a limited range of transactions, the outcome of which will be to set a price for that instrument, which will be either higher or lower than (or the same as) the most recently traded price for the instrument. From this information we can extract a mathematical relationship: price went up, price stayed the same, price went down.
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| Notice how arbitrary that “relationship” between two discrete transactions is. If they are independent of each other — and in a first order sense, they are — the participants in the later trade do not know who or where the participants in the earlier even are, let alone what their motivations for trading were — then a “trend” we draw between them is more or less meaningless.
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| But we draw it because we make some assumptions about the homogeneity of all market participants: we assume all have more or less perfect price information, and that all are propelled by an essential economic rationalism: you don’t sell things you expect to perform better than comparable investments, and you don’t buy things you expect to perform worse. Each investor’s private motivation is nuanced and personal — how is the rest of it's portfolio placed, what are the local macro risks to which it is especially sensitive, but largely these proclivities cancel themselves out in a large sample and we can treat professional market participants as largely homogenous.
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| This is good: it gets our model out of the gate. If investors were not broadly homogeneous, our statistics would not work. “What is the average height of all things” is not a meaningful calculation.
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| But there is a second order sense in which the earlier and later trades are related: the later participants know about the earlier trade and its price — and its position in a trend from the trade before that — and they will use l this abstract information to form their bid and ask. This interconnectedness of all similar transactions means they are ''not'' independent, as the probabilities of [[normal distributions]] require, but most of the time it's close enough: the immediate transaction history is pretty chaotic — as traders say, “noisy”— in the immediate term, here the dissimilarities between trader motivations are most pronounced, but over a large aggregation of trades these dissimilarities tend to cancel themselves out. A “signal” only emerges from the noise over time. If all traders are using market information, this immediate interdependence looks like independence. So a “normal” probabilistic model<ref>I am working hard not to use the intimidating term [[stochastic]]” by the way.</ref> works fairly well. In the same way, when you bounce a ball friction, energy loss, structural imperfections and intervening causal interference means the conditions to fully satisfy Newton’s model are never present, so a bouncing ball never quite obeys it, but it is close enough. So it is supposed to be with statistical techniques for measuring behaviour in the market. The occasional intervention of idiosyncratic behaviour is basically noise.
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| But there is a third order of dissimilarities. In times of stress in the market the behaviour of other people in the market ''directly'' and ''directionally'' affects your transaction, and yours affects others.
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| This is not just the crowded theatre phenomenon, when everyone stampedes for the exits at once, and the narrow aperture makes the stampede all the more urgent, and therefore dramatic — but second order features. An investor long “on margin” might wish to, and be able to, ride out a short term crash by meeting margin calls. In most dislocations this is the obvious and — if you can manage it, correct — thing to do. The market usually recovers, at least in the short term. But meeting your margin call means drawing on your revolving credit facility and your bank is experiencing a liquidity crisis and unexpectedly pulls you lines, or suspends withdrawals, as a result of its own market exposure to the crash. Your prime broker, usually patient with you and tolerant of peripheral looseness in your margin operations, is also under pressure, has told you today there is no flex, and for good measure, it is jacking up your IM.
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| Cash is suddenly King Queen, Jack and Ace. People on the TV wandering dazedly around outside their buildings clutching [[Iron Mountain]] boxes full of personal effects.
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| All indictators are going one way, across the board, in all markets and all asset classes.
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| buy or sell. In the modern days of computerised trading everything is very clean, tidy observable, unitary and discrete.
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| ====Derivatives trading====
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| In the context of trading derivatives, things that (a) you didn't reasonably expect and that . (b) bugger up your contract.
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| =====Credit defaults=====
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| A swap being a private, bilateral affair, the most obvious category of tail events is “things which mean your counterparty cannot, or will not, or has not, performed its end of the deal”.
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| Straight out refusal to — repudiation — is rare, at least without the cloak of some kind of dispute as to whether the party was under such an obligation in the first place.
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| Inability is the main player here: generally captured by insolvency, and correlative defaults under other agreements.
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| Much of financial services being a play on [[leverage]] — the name of the game being to earn more, with other people’s money, than it costs you to borrow it — many market participants flirt with various formulations of [[insolvency]] as a basic business model, so there tend to be some pushback on the parameters of these correlative failures and “ostensible inabilities” to perform. Much of a [[negotiator]]’s life is spent haggling about them.
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| Where refusal or inability to perform cannot be proven, actual failure to pay or deliver ends all arguments. If you ''actually'' haven’t performed, it no longer matters ''why''.
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| There is therefore a sort of hierarchy of these events. Actual default is the safest, and most common, default trigger. Bankruptcy is the next — though there is more looseness around some of its limbs, an administrator actually being appointed, or a petition actually being filmed is clean, public and unlikely to prompt many arguments. Default Under Specified Transaction — that transaction being one to which you are directly a party,
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| The remaining events are sketchy and unpopular, depending as they do on private information you most likely won't have about thresholds you can't easily calculate. We may argue till we are hoarse about Cross Default. We will not invoke it.
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| =====Externalities=====
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| There are a category of events which make it impossible even for a solvent counterparty to perform. Change in law, for example — it is not beyond possibility that certain kinds of swaps might be restricted or outlawed altogether<ref>Not long ago the European Union proposed restricting the carbon market to “end users” to discourage financial speculation, for example. This would have rendered certain forward contracts in {{euaprov|Allowances}} involving delivery to non-users illegal.</ref> or Tax events that make the transaction uneconomic as originally envisaged.
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| Secondary events of this kind — things that limit a dealer’s ability to hedge, or materially increase its costs of doing so, tend not to be Termination Events partly this reflects a fact not often stated, but nonetheless true: there is a price at which the parties will agree to terminate any swap. Just because a party doesn't have an economic option to terminate the trade doesn't mean it can't terminate the trade. It always has an “at market” option. In liquid markets during times of fair weather this is a source of great comfort; in illiquid markets and at times of stress, less so. A dealer will say, “I will always show you a price. You just might not mind the price, is all.”
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| Customers have less incentive to break trades if it means realising
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| {{sa}}
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| *[[The map and the territory]]
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