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Credit Derivatives

Instruments that isolate and transfer default risk — insurance-like payoffs on whether a borrower survives.

The shelf — 9 instruments

Credit Default Swap	Insurance on a borrower's default — and the market's sharpest real-time gauge of credit fear.
Factoring & Receivables Finance	Selling the money your customers owe you, today, at a discount. Financing that follows the invoice rather than the balance sheet — which is why weak companies can use it and why it hides so well.
Leveraged Loan	The senior, secured, floating-rate sibling of the junk bond — and the raw material every CLO is built from.

Asset Swap	A bond with its interest-rate risk surgically removed, leaving pure credit. The package that turns any bond into a floating-rate note and defines the spread the market quotes.
CDO & Synthetic Tranches	Slicing a pool of credit risk into layers of first-loss and last-loss — the machine that concentrated 2008, and the tranche market that outlived it.
CDS Index	Default protection on 100+ names in one trade — the S&P 500 of credit risk.
CDS Option	An option on the price of credit protection — the instrument that lets you be long the fear of a default without paying for it every day.
CLO	Leveraged corporate loans, tranched into everything from AAA paper to private-equity-style equity.
Credit-Linked Note	A bond with a CDS hidden inside: earn an enhanced coupon for carrying someone else's default risk.

The default cycle — Spreads lead defaults, and both cluster
Rating boundaries — A downgrade across the investment-grade line forces selling
Liquidity of the instrument — The index trades when the single names do not
Recovery assumptions — The same default is not the same loss
Basis between bond and derivative — The same credit priced two ways
Correlation, in anything tranched — It decides which slice takes the loss

Twice a year	Index roll
Quarterly	Coupon and reset dates
Quarterly	Company reporting
On the event	Credit-event determinations
Annually	Rating agency reviews

Counted from the same table each product page prints. Not a rating and not a ranking: there is deliberately no total.