Under Article 2(6) of Regulation of the European Parliament and Council of 4 July 2012 on OTC derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories (EMIR), a class of derivative is defined as “a subset of derivatives sharing common and essential characteristics including at least the relationship with the underlying asset, the type of underlying asset, and currency of notional amount.”
Furthermore, it is specified that “Derivatives belonging to the same class may have different maturities.”
Derivative classes are further split into sub-classes, taking into account any other characteristic required to identify one contract in the relevant class of OTC derivatives from another.
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) differentiates between 'key' characteristics and 'other' characteristics within each class.
Pursuant to ESMA the key characteristics are those characteristics which are shared by all contracts within a class (e.g. product type).
Other characteristics help to discriminate within a class (e.g. tenor).
For further details see asset class.
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