Template:Isda Preamble summ

Like all good stories, the ISDA starts with a {{ {{{1}}}|Preamble}}. Everyone, once, stares at that gnomic title and thinks, “okay, what the hell is this all about?”

Well, step this way, young padawan. Step into this rabbithole. Personal note: in Wellington, New Zealand, a chap called Gerald (if you’re reading, hi, Gerald!) asked a callow young contrarian to look have a look at this odd document that seemed to be called an Aïessdiyé once, in about 1995, and — well, here we all are, folks.

Honestly, if I had known how much time I was going to spend with the damn thing I would have paid a lot more attention to it in the first place.

A word on industry associations

Sell-side

ISDA, which publishes the ISDA, was the “International Swap Dealers Associations, Inc.” — interesting plural, that — but in any case, outwardly a sell-side industry association. Sometime between 1992 and 2002, it rebranded itself as the “International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc.”: singular, at the same time more unitary and more inclusive sounding, but still in spirit the same old ISDA, stake-held predominantly by the largest broker-dealers on the face of the Earth.

It may have aspirations to conquer the world — increasingly, it seems hell-bent on doing so, encroaching on the commodities, carbon, securities financing and crypto domains — but for now ISDA remains a “dealer-community” association, largely devoted to the swap.

Buy-side

These days the “buy-side lobby” is bigger, more organised and better represented than it used to be, with the following associations representing its interests:

AIMA (the Alternative Investment Management Association)
EFAMA (the European Fund and Asset Management Association)
The MFA (the Managed Funds Association) — not to be confused, by the way, with the Fund Management Association of Kenya — and
The AI (the Investment Association).

The preamble

The {{{{{1}}}|preamble}} is just the loosener before things get properly going, and there is not a lot to see. It has not changed a lot between the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA (nor indeed, from the 1987 ISDA, except that the Single Agreement clause got promoted from a casual remark during the warm-up, in the 1987 ISDA, to the first searching delivery of the first over.