Template:M summ Equity Derivatives 1

If you are looking for literature to broaden your earthly perspective, or shine a torch into the dark crevices of the human condition, the 2002 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions might not be the first volume you would pull off the shelf, but in its own way, in its Escheresque self-referencing reflexivity, it affords us an oblique perspective on the motivations of those who operate in the strange demi-monde of the international capital markets.

Commonplaces of the sort any mug knows instinctively without needing to be told are said, said, and said again; abstrusities about which even the cognoscenti might like more elucidation — like what counts as a “Dividend” — are left tantalisingly under-determined. Some parts — the calculation of Dividend Amount — just don’t work at all, so the market has resorted to its own organic means of resolution (the JC has its own suggestions, too — see here).