Children of the Woods

Myths and legends of the market The JC’s guide to the foundational mythology of the markets.™ →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Mythology 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.

The Synthæse, or Children of the Forest, were a prehistoric proto-civilisation of woodland sprites and hippies; a kind of peaceable pre-derivative, banking people, largely unconcerned with material wealth but blessed with a preternatural gift for option pricing. They roamed the moors and fens of England semi-naked in the time before the alliance of men and elves, eschewing all earthly rancour, regarding physical settlement of disputes as sinful and instead voluntarily exchanging their differences in a standardised, non-physical, “synthetic” terms across a centralised marketplace.

Alas, they modeled their delta by using profoundly flawed value-at-risk techniques and wildly miscalculated their exposure to the First Men, a marauding race of mercenary derivatives salesmen from the ancient doomed cirty of Salomoné, who it is said, wiped them out in the late 1980s in one big bang, but not before they left behind traces of their enlightened methods of exchange which the First Men hungrily adopted: the 1985 ISDA Code and the Cross Default clause, which still afflicts the ISDA Master Agreement to this day.

See also

• The First Men
• 1985 ISDA Code