Template:M comp disc Equity Derivatives 12.8

If it’s a beast under the 2002 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions, it was going to be worse under the (ill-fated) 2011 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions, though it seems, after nearly a decade of solemn inactivity, we will now never know just bad how it was going to be.

But we can take some solance that, however bad we may have found things, somewhere out in the multiverse there is alternative us; a world just like this one, only in which the market adopted the 2011 Equity Derivatives Definitions instead of roundly ignoring them. In that accursed parallel universe, our mortal equivalents — people who otherwise resemble you and me, readers — who live, love and aspire to intellectual and moral fulfillment, just as we do — those poor souls endure this unending hardship. It falls to Clifford Chance — not without some hubris, we feel — to imagine what that experience might have been like, had it been visited upon us:

“This provision has been amended heavily and now runs to over 10 pages. It sets out different optional methods of calculating the transaction value, rather than following a purely replacement value approach (as under the 2002 Definitions) which was considered not to be appropriate in all cases. Greater detail is also provided as to how and when the Cancellation Amount is to be determined, what data is to be taken into account and how losses/gains resulting from hedge close-outs are allocated.”