Financial Derivative Investments: An Introduction To Structured Products

Thought I would write a review on this piece of art!Let me tell you I work as a private banker for a well known UK bank. Recently we have experienced a lot of interest from investors to put their monies into capital protected or partly protected structured products. Ok, I have been doing this job for a long while, but just now admittedly realised that I lack some detailed knowledge in structured products; the questions from my clients became quite versatile and more in depth, so, perhaps, I was not really informed how the investment into SP works really, except of knowing some basics guidelines we need to follow that the bank sets for our sales.Well. Being a proud banker I have decided to bring my forces into the Google search for a book that would fill my knowledge gaps.... I must say, there are not many books available on the subject in the manner that will appeal to a reader with some knowledge of these investments. There are either books for nerds with loads of mathematical equations that need to be read with a dictionary (would take me ages and can cost me my job!); or the others - that would just give an overall review of how the investment is structured, how, when, for how long, what is good and what is bad in termsheets that are produced by our structured products managers. The latter seems to be missing from the financial books market full stop, however I looked long enough and hooray a newly written and published - Dr Bateson's book - this is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks dear friends, and happy reading, just like it was for me.

I am a Russian student that is studying for the CFA exams and what I have found difficult so far is to understand the basic idea/core that a structured product implies; without talking about complicating formulas, etc. The book has helped me to get the missing knowledge that is not that clear in my study books. This is a brilliant tool to get you to realise how the structured products are working and why this is the way! Absolutely brilliant.Dr Bateson is an amazing writer with an easy and precise language that he is using in his book. He used a number of stories from his actual personal experience when he was working in different financial institutions. Some are very funny and show how incompetent some of the structured products managers can be (showing a complete disaster when an investor looses all the money he invested into the initially seems to be a very good investment) ; others are very much to the point and explained the process of inventing different types of this financial instrument - from the very beginning to the very end (when it actually brings profit to investors). Structured products are complicated financial products and very few people do know how they are built up from a simple idea to this complicated derivative instrument that is quite popular in the current financial market.Well, if you decide you need to follow up on the examples of structured products described in this book, then just go to the Appendix and see your formulas that are listed in the book after the text itself! Basically, this particular book will appeal to any reader - from a beginner to an experienced banker.