Structured Products (SPs): Access To Niche Markets Unavailable in ETFs and CEFs?

Roger Nusbaum submits: Lately I have been trying to learn more about structured products (SPs). I spent some time on Quantum Online's structured products page.

I wrote about an Asian currency-based SP (I actually found a second one too) for RealMoney earlier this week. I found several more that are linked to the CBOE Buy Write Index (BXM). A couple of the tickers look familiar from comments left by readers on previous posts about covered call CEFs.

Here are the symbols I found; BWR, BXA, DBY, MBJ, DBZ, MBS. Very simply, the better BXM does the more these SPs return at maturity. From there it gets very complex and trying to read a prospectus on one of these before going to sleep is not very productive.

The point of this post is that in SPs there might be an avenue for products that capture very specific themes not available with ETFs or CEFs. By virtue that there are two Asian currency SPs perhaps means that SPs linked to commodity based currencies (something I have felt is needed for a while) or commodity based equity baskets is possible.

For now I'm still figuring these out but in the past I was dismissive of these and now I think there is some value in some of them, if you roll up your sleeves.

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Related:

• Other articles on the Seeking Alpha Network by Roger Nussbaum.
• The complete list of ETFs and closed-end funds (and links to articles about them) covered by ETF Investor.