Structured products

• Jun 19, 2026
• risk-management

FRM Handbook Ch 23: Credit Derivatives and Structured Products (Structured Products and CDOs)

Book: Financial Risk Manager Handbook Plus Test Bank
Author: Philippe Jorion
ISBN: 978-0-470-90401-5

The second half of Chapter 23 is where credit derivatives stop looking like insurance contracts and start looking like factory assembly lines. Banks slice pools of bonds into tranches, sell the safe-looking pieces to pension funds, and park the toxic waste in the equity slice. Jorion walks through how these structures work, and more importantly, what cannot change when you repackage cash flows.

• Feb 14, 2026
• finance

Fixed Income Term Sheets: Real Product Examples

Theory is nice. But at some point you have to price actual products that real people are trading. Chapter 38 of Wilmott’s book takes two interesting fixed-income contracts and walks through how to price them from scratch. No hand waving. Just the math, the logic, and even the code.

• Feb 10, 2026
• finance

Mortgage-Backed Securities: The Products Behind the Crisis

Most people know what a mortgage is. You borrow money to buy a house, you make monthly payments, and after 20 or 30 years you own the house free and clear. But what happens to all those mortgages after the bank gives them out? They get bundled together and sold to investors. That is a mortgage-backed security. Chapter 34 of Wilmott’s book explains how these things work, why they are tricky to price, and what makes them different from every other fixed-income product.

• Jan 24, 2019
• finance

Product Design in Behavioral Finance

Chapter 7 of “Behavioral Finance for Private Banking” is about structured products. If you’ve never heard of them, don’t worry. Most people haven’t. But by the end of 2007, there were more than 340 billion Swiss francs invested in them in Switzerland alone. That’s 6.5% of all assets under management. Over 20,000 different structured products listed on the Swiss stock exchange.