td securities
A capital markets desk has a rhythm to it that you only understand by being inside it for long enough. The morning briefings, the risk reports that arrived before the open, the way a rate move in Tokyo became a margin call in Toronto before most people were at their desks. At TD Securities I was on the Capital Markets Risk Management desk for five years — 2017 to 2022 — which meant the rhythm included some of the most volatile stretches in recent market history. March 2020 arrived while I was still learning which counterparty relationships had zero tolerance for a late margin call and which had implicit operational flexibility. That knowledge was not written down anywhere.
The desk worked OTC derivatives — the bilateral, customized instruments that couldn't be compressed into a clearable format. Interest rate structures with non-standard terms, cross-currency arrangements, credit exposures tailored to a specific hedging need. On paper, the notional exposure was enormous. In practice, the number that mattered was current exposure after netting: what the firm actually held against each counterparty at any given mark. The Uncleared Margin Rules, phased in across years, kept reshaping how that exposure was managed — each new phase catching a wider population of counterparties and pulling them into the initial margin regime. By the time Phase 6 arrived in September 2022, the desk had absorbed several of those step-changes in operational volume. The regulatory landscape wasn't static; neither was the work.
What I learned about uncertainty on that desk came not from theory but from proximity. When thirty margin calls arrive on a high-volatility day — rate moves, credit spread widening, a sovereign event repricing several positions simultaneously — the question isn't how to calculate the right response. It's how to triage among incomplete information, counterparty-specific context, and settlement cutoffs that don't wait for clarity. The seniors on the desk had absorbed years of those situations. They knew things that weren't in any document — which counterparty would dispute on a Tuesday but not a Thursday, which collateral substitution requests to anticipate, which valuation divergences were noise and which were worth a call. That knowledge had a texture to it. You learned it through observation, through small mistakes with forgiving consequences, through being in the room when someone more experienced made a call and watching how it resolved.
March 2020 was unlike anything the desk had seen in the preceding three years. The speed of the repricing, the simultaneous pressure across asset classes, the operational demands of a team suddenly working remotely while managing a book that didn't pause for it — all of it compressed into a window of weeks. The risk management infrastructure held in the ways that mattered. What I noticed was how much the desk's function in that period depended on judgment that had no formal substrate: the read on a counterparty's operational state, the decision to dispute a call or absorb the difference, the sense of which fires were genuinely urgent and which looked urgent but could wait an hour. That judgment lived in people. The seniors on the desk had it. The rest of us were building it.
The cross-functional work I was doing in parallel — trying to make the desk's institutional knowledge legible enough to share, to train on, to revisit when conditions changed — was a kind of archaeology. Not the formal process documentation that compliance required, but the softer layer underneath: why we did it this way, what the counterparty relationship context was, what a different approach had cost the desk the last time someone tried it. That layer was held by people who were sometimes only two or three years from retiring. The work of making it transferable felt genuinely urgent in a way I don't think I could have articulated clearly at the time, but which the environment made obvious.