Final Price - Equity Derivatives Provision
Template:Eqderivanat Note that Final Price isn't necessary the final Final Price: you determine a fresh Final Price on every Valuation Date, as of the Valuation Time, and they feed into the Cash Settlement (or Equity Notional Reset) process, whereby one party pays out the movement price of the underlier over the period since the last Valuation Date.
Thus, Final Price for today’s Valuation Date becomes the Initial Price for the next Valuation Date, and so on and so on — yesterday’s rooster is today’s feather duster so to say.
Only on the final Final Price does the Transaction terminate and that contingency — you know, calling it quits and wrapping the whole thing up — isn’t addressed in any particular way in the definitions booklet, the presumption being that you will just follow the same procedure as you would for any other Valuation Date on the last one. This might give your US Tax guy the heebie-jeebies, be warned, as he will want VWAP, or some kind of hypothetical broker dealer referenced in the very last one. Dash cold water in his face if so, and tell him to get it together, man.
Synthetic prime brokerage
Where you are doing synthetic equity swaps, the Final Price on the Termination Date — the very one which gives your tax guy the heebie-jeebies — is mainly of academic interest, as it will only be a jowl-slappingly fortuitous coincidence if a client happens to go off risk at exactly the scheduled Termination Date.
In fact, a synthetic equity swap is an indefinite arrangement — it is replicating cash prime brokerage, remember, where a fellow holds (or shorts) a security at her own pleasure, so to speak — so the client can terminate at any time, and if it doesn’t terminate by the scheduled Termination Date she will typically want to roll the position (if she can[1]) without realising a gain or loss. Thus the Termination Date is fairly arbitrary, existing really only to avoid syntax errors in a booking system which will insist on you inputting one, or to resolve the unspoken anguish of your financial reporting folk who may otherwise fear you have an undated exposure to the underlying security[2].
On the difference between Final Price and Relevant Price
Final Price is defined in Article 5 of the 2002 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions and is germane therefore to Equity Swap Transactions only and not, say, Forward Transactions (which, circuitously, rely instead on Relevant Price, albeit defined in a similar way).
The Final Price also has separately broken-out scenarios for Basket Transactions (being just the weighted sums of the individual components in the basket). Relevant Price doesn't bother to break these out — whether that is a function of the fact that Share Basket Forwards behave differently to Basket Swaps, or just because the drafting committee was losing the will to live, is a question to which we have yet to get to the bottom.
Don’t hold your breath.
Where share Final Price is determined by reference to the Volume Weighted Average Price during a trading session you may see this following amendment:
- (a) Section 6.3(a) is amended by deleting “at any time during the one hour period that ends at the relevant Valuation Time, Latest Exercise Time, Knock-in Valuation Time or Knock-out Valuation Time, as the case may be” and replacing it with “at any time during the regular trading session on the Exchange, without regard to after hours or any other trading outside of the regular trading session hours”.
- (b) Section 6.3(d) is amended by deleting the remainder of the provision following the term “Scheduled Closing Time” in the fourth line thereof;
- (c) If the final Valuation Date is a Disrupted Day, the Calculation Agent may determine that such day is a Disrupted Day only in part, in which case the Calculation Agent must designate the Valuation Date determined pursuant to Section 6.6(a) for the remaining portion and the Calculation Agent must adjust the Number of Shares for which the Disrupted Day is the Valuation Date and must determine the Final Price based on such adjustments which will be based on such factors as the Calculation Agent considers relevant.
The current US tax interpretation is that benchmarking an equity swap on a US Share to the close is viewed a cross (and one is guilty until proven innocent). Therefore, do not use the official closing price for US Shares at maturity as it would then invalidate them as true derivatives and recharacterise them as repos. Instead, confirm VWAP over the day as an observable benchmark price for termination.
This does not, however, prevent one early-terminating an Equity Swap Transaction on a US Share using methods other than VWAP. Now, if you are a synthetic prime brokerage sort of camper, you might wonder why all this fuss as equity swaps are treated, for most purposes, as undated and are always terminated at the client’s motion as an optional early termination.
See also
References
- ↑ There are complicated US Tax rules at play here
- ↑ Not, in fact true, as the broker-dealer will almost certainly have a right to terminate on (a month or more’s) notice, but do not expect this to placate a financial controller.