Abstract
Basket credit derivatives are financial contracts whose payout depends on the credit events, such as "failure to pay" or "default", characterising a portfolio of bonds or loans over a determined time horizon. This paper proposes some analytical solutions to the problem of pricing particularly complex credit derivatives, resorting to approximations if a closed form solution is not available. The focus is on two types of credit derivatives whose payouts depend respectively on the temporal ranking of the credit events (first-to-default, second-to-default, and so on) and on the percentiles of the portfolio's loss distribution induced by the credit events. The latter is often embedded in securitisations of portfolios of bonds or loans where the credit enhancement of the different classes of credit linked notes is built upon a "waterfall" structure.