Derivatives

Contracts whose value derives from another asset — for hedging, leverage, or expressing a view that the underlying alone can't.

Difficulty advanced

Reading order

1. Futures — standardized forwards, margin, contango/backwardation
2. Options — pricing, Greeks, volatility, payoff strategies
3. Swaps — interest-rate, currency, total-return
4. Structured Products — note + derivative packages

What you should walk away with

• The ability to price and hedge a vanilla option from first principles.
• An intuition for how each derivative shifts risk between counterparties.
• A reading vocabulary for institutional fixed-income and structured-credit desks.

Next section

Risk Management →