A pays the floating rate L and receives 24 per cent minus 2L, which nets to 24 minus 3L and factors as three times 8 minus L: three vanilla swaps at eight per cent, so the fixed rate was never the twenty-four printed on the deal. Reading it as twenty-four is a 48-point error at a floating rate of twenty-four. The article also carries the version that does need a model, where a floor on the inverse leg adds two caplets struck at twelve and the factorisation fails.
A shift leaves every deviation from the mean untouched, and a stretch multiplies the covariance and one standard deviation by the same factor, so both cancel out of the ratio. The tempting answer of five times rho is worse than wrong: at rho = 0.40 it names 2.0, which Cauchy-Schwarz forbids any correlation from reaching. The article carries the general affine rule, the sign flip a negative factor produces, and the curved maps the invariance does not survive.
The two correlations you are handed do not pin the third one down, but they fence it into exactly [−1/50, 1], and that interval dips below zero. The fence falls out of a 3×3 determinant read as a quadratic in the unknown, and out of a picture: 0.7 is an angle of 45.573°, both stocks live on a cone of that half-angle around the index, and putting them on opposite sides opens 91.146° between them. Also here: why the real tipping point is ab ≥ 0 together with a² + b² ≥ 1 rather than "both above 0.707", why 0.9 and 0.5 force a positive answer while 0.9 and −0.9 allow −1, why standing on the floor costs a rank, and why three Bernoulli(0.5) indicators with the same two correlations are confined to [0.40, 1] instead.
Raise your right hand at a mirror and the reflected hand stays on the same side of the room, which means the usual question has a false premise. A plane mirror is the matrix diag(1, 1, -1): it fixes both axes lying in the glass and reverses only the direction you look along. Its determinant is -1, so no rotation reproduces it, and the sideways flip everyone reports belongs to the half turn you perform in your head.