Once upon a time, the retail investment world was a quiet, rather pleasant place where a small, distinguished cadre of trustees and asset managers devised prudent portfolios for their well-heeled clients within a narrowly defined range of high-quality debt and equity instruments. Financial innovation and the rise of the investor class changed all that. One innovation that has gained traction as an... 

Exchange-traded notes are like the forgotten stepchildren of the ETF industry: unloved and overlooked. Investors (particularly taxable investors) are missing out. I remember when ETNs first came to market in 2006: Investors couldn’t get enough of them. Barclays Capital launched the iPath Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index ETN (NYSEArca: DJP) and it quickly gathered assets. The reason was simple: ETNs... 

Given recent market turmoil, budget deficits, high unemployment, and the risk of elevated inflation, Americans are worried about the stock market and their investments. In such uncertain economic times, understanding all of your options is half the battle. Frequently, strategies emerge that are unfamiliar to both average investors and even some seasoned investment managers. One such investment is the... 

These products are a natural fit for financial institutions and their conservative customer base. Structured CDs seemed to come out of nowhere. But they quickly became, arguably, the hottest products in the bank channel. Sometimes called market-linked CDs, or equity-linked CDs, these products have displayed amazing growth over the last several years. They belong to the family of products collectively... 

Reverse convertibles and other structured investments promise to boost returns and limit risks. In the years after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, U.S. investors were hungry for anything that could give their portfolios a boost—or at least stanch the bleeding. Stocks plunged.  The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lost half of its value from its 2000 peak to its low in 2002. Bonds or money markets... 

Structured products are the fastest growing investment class in the U.S., according to their aptly named advocacy and trade group, the Structured Products Association. Although they’re not available on-line as yet, they will be before too long, and investors should be aware of their role in a portfolio. Common in Europe, these are synthetic investments that are usually offered in the form of a bond... 

A great deal has been written recently about “reverse convertibles,” but there has been surprisingly little analysis about how this investment is to be used in a diversified portfolio.  Contrary to most press accounts, reverse convertibles are not “yield plays,” they are single-stock “equity substitutes.”  Here’s a summary of how they compare to common...