A workbook for practising lawyers · English law
Derivatives
Swaps, caps and the master agreement — explained the way a file explains them. Atlas borrowed at a floating rate to buy a company, swapped that rate for a fixed one with its own arranging bank, and two years later discovered that the swap did not end when the loan did. Follow that file from the first board paper to the last wire, with the full training master agreement to read clause by clause.
Chapter 1 is free to read now — the whole first quarter of the file. The edition unlocks the other fourteen chapters, the full master agreement, and the forty-question exam.
How this workbook works
No pricing models
We never price a swap; we read one. The numbers are the file's own — two legs, the days, the netted line — and the Hedge Sheet's figures appear in every chapter, so you follow the money with a pencil, not a model. No discount factors, no Greek letters, and every percentage says what it is a percentage of.
One sheet, all the way through
Every chapter opens and closes on the same Hedge Sheet: the loan, this quarter's payment, and what the swap is worth today. You watch a value become a demand for cash, and then a bill.
Test yourself
Every chapter ends with a 10-question test (pass mark 8). Finish with a 40-question final exam. Your progress is saved to your Solon Press profile.
The case: hedging a €35,000,000 acquisition loan
November 2026. Atlas Payments Group plc, a London payments group, has just drawn €35,000,000 at a floating rate to pay for Solaris Digital Assets Europe Limited, the Irish crypto-asset firm it was buying, and its board would rather know what the next five years cost than find out quarter by quarter. So on the morning the loan's first rate is fixed, Atlas signs a swap with Caldermere — the bank that arranged the loan, now wearing a different hat — and buys a cap on the rest. This workbook follows what happens next: the quarter the rate moved the wrong way, the morning a prepayment turned value into cash, the Monday the bank asked for €290,000, and the refinancing that cost €668,000 to leave a hedge nobody remembered signing.
The full master agreement is on this site — the Schedule where the fights happened, the Collateral Annex, three confirmations and the close-out statement — and chapters link straight into its clauses. The loan being hedged is the one our finance workbook documents, for the acquisition our M&A workbook papers.
The modules
Reference shelf
The Master Agreement
The complete training document: the master text, the Schedule, the Collateral Annex, three confirmations, the exhibits and the Hedge Sheet record.
Glossary
Every derivatives term used here in plain English — including the exotic names you should recognise but will not be taught.
Final Exam
Forty questions across all fifteen chapters. Pass mark 32. Open book, like real practice.
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Finance Deals & Syndicated Lending
The loan this hedge sits beside: €35m of term debt, with its own complete training facility agreement.
M&A Foundations
The acquisition the loan paid for — the €42m sale of Solaris, with a full training share purchase agreement.
Security & Collateral
Charges, pledges and the lender's toolkit — where title-transfer collateral meets real security. Coming soon.