Past, present and future

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown Past, Present and Future (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1923) Stuff you will only only get on the Premium JC: Nutshell summaries “General” and “detailed” sections in anatomies Market structure content In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

How it started

The JC has been running in one form or another now for nearly fifteen years. It started out as one dude trying to nut out the close out mechanics of the ISDA Master Agreement and then put it somewhere where he wouldn’t lose it. It has grown a bit since then but that is still the basic idea.

The open source MediaWiki platform — the same one Wikipedia runs on — turned out to be a really good way of maintaining and building knowhow. Creating, linking and cross-referencing material in a holistic and non-linear way is simple.

Being easily distracted and essentially a lazy sod — which I maintain is a paragon virtue — this way of working suits me perfectly. You can quickly create articles, save them down, and fix them them later. You can edit while you are on the train, walking the dog, or being driven slowly up the wall by middle managers on the weekly regulatory change stakeholder check-point all-hands conference call. It is perfect for the frequently interrupted and the chronically wanting of an attention span. Anything you start now you can save down and come back to later. If you never do, it can’t have been that important.

This is content creation by a kind of alluvial process: small, inconsequential additions silt up over time. It doesn’t need a grand plan. It’s forever provisional. Iterative. That suits the erratic, impulsive nature of modern practice. It certainly suits me.

So I started silting away. Before long, the JC had fully summarised and analysed anatomies of both editions of the ISDA, and other definitions booklets, master agreements, and legal resources followed. Some remained embryonic, some got deleted, some grew.

Coverage has always been idiosyncratic, following my prevailing practice specialisation, which has meandered over the years (you will observe: ISDA, equities, equity derivatives, prime brokerage, emissions, exchange traded derivatives, structured notes, repackaging, credit derivatives and, along the way, a fair bit of regulatory stuff).

The focus has always been analysing, explaining, simplifying, demystifying and contextualising — the commercial context the most important of all since that is the aspect most often lost on newcomers (and, frankly, old hands) in these highly specialised products.

The tone is idiosyncratic and unashamedly non-corporate and it will stay that way. From the start, creating the JC had to be not just easy, but fun to write: there was no way I could ever have stuck at anything for so long if it was a drag. And Lord only knows, there is much that is absurd about our modern corporate life and the people who populate the landscape of the financial markets.

All of this, with a day-job. Mind you, the JC has largely been how I have managed to do a day job since I started it — lawyers gravely undervalue knowledge management, even though it should be the most important thing they do. Nevertheless I owe a debt of gratitude to a sequence of employers over the last decade and a half for letting me carry on with it. They know who they are.

Where it’s at

Broadly the JC splits down three ways:

Waggery: Basic waggishness for the sake of it — Toto chat, Otto Büchstein and Opco Boone nonsense. This has little value to anyone but me, and will stay free. If you enjoy it, great!

Noble amateurism: Substantive content about things I am not expert in, but which I’ve read about in my travels and which I thought are tangential to legal practice and office life: business management, complexity, systems theory, behavioural psychology, organisational sociology and so on. Much of this is in the form of summaries, book reviews and (often ham-fisted) longer essays which synthesize this learning into something useful for modern life and career management. This material will also, for the time being, be on the free site.

Legal stuff: Detailed legal documentation “anatomies”. These include hyperlinked versions of canonical legal terms, the JC’s own Nutshell™ summaries of those terms, comparisons and in-depth discussion and analysis of common practical, commercial and legal issues. Also, longer (also often ham-fisted) essays on market history, market dislocations and catastrophic events, and how regulators and banking institutions have reacted to them or, in the JC’s unsolicited opinion, should have. This material draws on 30 year “school of life” experience as a practising lawyer in the international financial markets. This will make up the bulk of the premium content.

It shouldn’t need to be said but, let’s say it: this is an information resource and not specific legal advice. Any reader uses it at her own risk. These are strong opinions weakly held: they are personal, idiosyncratic, impatient, polemical and, surprise surprise, contrarian. A good portion of them are probably wrong. Like its author’s mind, it is also prone to unexpected change, without warning or notice. Everything is provisional.

This material is, in other words, for discussion between peers. It is no tablet from Mount Sinai. It is meant for people who are engaged in specialist negotiation and advisory capacities, who will already have a basic technical grounding in these disciplines and who are experienced and sceptical enough to disagree with it. The JC makes no apologies for sticking two fingers up at conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is welcome to stick two fingers right back up at the JC, and often does.

That is one of the key values this material brings: a different perspective, to tweak the nose of complacency, to apple-pie the bed of dogmatic slumber, and to challenge perfectly reasonable preconceptions. The JC is not perfect. But as the financial disasters roll of honour demonstrates, neither is anyone else. There are fakers, dilettantes, confidence players and bullshit artists everywhere. The JC just admits to being one, is all.

Think of the JC as a contribution to your cognitive diversity quotient.

Where it’s going

There are a host of “push” resources out there: client briefings, newsletters, Twitter feeds and so on, shunting discrete and unconnected “timely” information at you. There are comparatively few “pull” resources — deep, interconnected, nonlinear resources where the reader comes to the material, rather than having it shoved in the reader’s face. This is because building a pull resource is a big job. You can’t do it overnight, and it usually takes a lot of people and coordination.

Rather by accident, the JC has become one such resource. It gets a fairly regular flow of about 10,000 unique visitors per month. Beyond rough geographic data, which suggests the JC is popular in places where people negotiate ISDA Master Agreements, we don’t know much about its readership, other than that they too are interested in whether Kilimanjaro really rises above the Serengeti. (It’s our top search).

You lovely premium subscribers will help fund technological improvements the site needs to grow, and to build out its content: better documentation of and a tidy-up to the coding to manage the technical back-end, which should make the whole thing more consistent. We would like to commission some help to build out premium content, making the site more comprehensive: as a premium subscriber you would benefit from that. We have some far-off, dreamy plans to create a customised offering for in-house teams, but that is a bit further off in the future.

We also hope our premium subscribers will influence where we should focus content build out.

Olly Buxton
The Jالی Contrarian