Paris, France
25 October 2007 Structured Products for Retail
Investors: Lessons from Germany
Report Published by Celent
German retail investors have a breathtaking array of
almost 250,000 structured products or warrants to choose from. This report
examines this market and assesses the potential in other regions.
Structured products, sometimes referred to as
warrants or certificates, have become popular in a number of European
countries, particularly in Norway, Germany, and Switzerland. However, the
German market stands out in terms of the size and depth of its market.
With almost 250,000 instruments traded, retail investors can select from a
bewildering array of derivative structured products from mundane call or
put options in indices to highly complex derivatives based on baskets of
equities, commodities, interest rates, or currencies. As extraordinary as
the current number of structured products is, German banks are pumping new
products into the market at a staggering rate of about 1,500 new
instruments per day.
A new Celent report, Structured
Products for Retail Investors: Lessons from Germany, examines the
German market, including a review of product types, trading volumes, and
distribution channels, and draws conclusions regarding the applicability
of such instruments to other markets.
"The German experience
with structured products suggests that there are large, untapped pools of
potential products for retail customers in other countries, particularly
the simpler structured products. However, regulatory hurdles in a number
of countries pose a formidable hurdle to their introduction," says Octavio
Marenzi, author of the report.
The 19-page report contains
nine figures and two tables. A table of
contents is available online.
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