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can anyone point me to recent documentation that defines each of the above terms: “trade, deal, contract, transaction” and how they are / are not used, or interact in FpML ?
There isn’t much consistency on the market about this, not even on the legal documentation where in most part they are used as synonyms. Trade and transaction are used as synonyms. Most of the ISDA documentation uses transaction but it defines concepts such as trade date as a property of a transaction so they are pretty much equivalent. Intially everything was a trade in FpML but the concept of Contract was introduced to represent trades at the allocation level. This is mainly used for the communication between IM and Custodians. There is a proposal in FpML 5.0 to replace the concept of Contract by Trade again since this distinction is causing confusion in the users of the standard. A deal is used in the syndicated loans market to represent an agreement between the borrower and the other parties.
