Swap is a contract between two parties in which the parties: (a) promise to make payments to one another on scheduled dates in the future, and (b) use different criteria or formulas to determine their respective payments. Swaps are not guaranteed by any clearinghouse, and, therefore, are susceptible to default. Because of this, the contracting parties are sometimes required to post collateral or mark to market. Corporations and financial institutions are the primary users of swaps.
Swaps are equivalent to a series of forward contracts, each with the same price. However, the structure of a swap can be far more efficient than a package of individual contracts. There are five classes of swaps defined by the type of their underlying instrument: interest rate, equity, currency, commodity and credit.
SWAP REFERENCES
Hull, J. (2011). Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (8th ed). Pearson / Prentice Hall.
Brigo, D., & Mercurio, F. (2006). Interest Rate Models - Theory and Practice (2nd ed). Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Duffie, D. (2001). Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory (3rd ed). Princeton University Press.
Bjork, T. (2009). Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time (3rd ed). Oxford University Press.
Lipton, A. (2001). Mathematical Methods for Foreign Exchange: A Financial Engineer's Approach. World Scientific.
SWAP RESOURCES