After the fund boom in 2019 and 2020, many investors now face a difficult choice: invest? Afraid of falling! No? Inflation! Low interest rates!

At this time, a very popular financial product in Europe and the United States, Japan and South Korea and other developed countries: structured products, also began to spread in the domestic investment and financial market. Structured product is an innovation of fixed income derivatives. It can enable investors to invest in certain types of risk assets (equity, foreign exchange, etc.), have the opportunity to obtain higher returns, and at the same time better control risks and obtain more definite returns.To sum up, earnings are resilient and pullbacks are resilient.

Why did this more balanced product only become popular in China in recent years?

The main reason is that the investment environment has changed and the mentality of investors has also changed. In the past 40 years of rapid development in China, the one-year deposit interest rate has dropped from 10.07% to 8%, and then to about 1.7% now. In addition to the economic transformation and upgrading and the slowdown in growth, there is also a very important general trend of population aging.

From the experience of Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, with the slowdown of economic growth and the aging of the population, in order to ensure economic vitality, low interest rates are inevitable, and absolutely safe high-yield financial management is very scarce.

These developed economies have had low or even negative interest rates for many years, so structured products were first introduced from the European market. Because of the capital preservation characteristics of most structured products and the ability to be "tailored" according to the different needs of investors, it has become one of the fastest growing areas in the international financial market. The European market has also become the main battlefield of structured products. The size of structured products in the European market is as high as 2.2 trillion euros. The market of structured products in the United States is also developed, and its product innovation ability is outstanding. The classic modern structured products are first sprung up by the United States.

In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and other regions, structured products have developed rapidly since they entered the Asian market in the 1990s. At present, the Asia-Pacific market has become an important part of the global structured product market.

The rapid development of structured products benefits from its unique advantages:

1. Flexibility and customization:

The issuer can customize the specific structure of the structured product, including the degree of risk, linked assets, etc., or provide the corresponding product according to the investor's own market point of view.

2. Potential coupons and market participation:

Structured products can not only provide relatively high coupon returns, but also provide some degree or different directions of risk asset market participation. For example, structured products linked to the Hang Seng Index can be bullish or bearish in the process of investor customization, while the change in earnings of structured products can be linked to the increase of the Hang Seng Index by 100% or 50%.

3. High credit rating:

This is an important advantage that is easy to be overlooked by investors. Because the counterparty of the structured product is the financial institution, the final income payment is not through the financial asset-related provider but the financial institution. Therefore, the high credit rating of large financial institutions is also one of the advantages of the structured product itself. For example, if a customized structured product is linked to the stock of a listed company, then even if the listed company is delisted, the product will be paid as usual as long as there is nothing wrong with the financial institution that sold the structured product.

At the same time, with the turbulence of the external situation, the uncertainty of Sino-US relations and the slowdown of overall economic growth, the over-the-counter option structure dominated by shark fin and snowball structure in China's structured product market is gradually recognized and recognized by the market in the form of structured products.

And in the past two years, most domestic investors have accumulated two or three rounds of alternating investment experience, and even experienced the torture of P2P, the understanding of the relationship between risk and return has matured a lot, and has become much calmer about investment. After seeing the shark fin product which has a bottom line and flexible income, it can be said that he suddenly looked back, but the man was in the dim light.

However, there are risks in investment, and there are also three risks in structured products, which need to be treated with caution:

1. Market risk:

Because structured products are still linked to a certain class of assets, structured products will incur losses or fail to achieve expected returns when the market changes.

2. Liquidity risk:

Structured products generally have a certain period of time, and all income encashment generally occurs at the time when the product expires or is redeemed in advance set by the issuer, and investors can not cash in the income or realize the product at any time.

3. Credit risk:

The issuer is still likely to default on its debt.

Although structured investment products can exist in the form of bills, structured deposits, etc., they should be treated as derivatives rather than fixed income assets. Assets linked to structured products are often risky assets, so structured products also bear the return risk caused by market changes, although the risk structure of structured products is different from the linear risk of assets.

At the same time, as an alternative to traditional financial management, structured products have attracted more and more attention in the domestic market. Compared with the normalization of structured products in the European market and the substitution of traditional financial products, domestic structured products still have a broad space for development. With the regulation of the market and the innovation of products, structured products are expected to become a long-term growing category of financial products.

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