The financial products atlas
Every product on the street,
explained & priced.
129 instruments, from the simplest level up — for students, desk newcomers and markets interviews.
No product is named that.
Cash Equities
Direct ownership instruments — shares and the funds that wrap them. The simplest claim on a company's future.
Common Stock
A fractional ownership stake in a company — with voting rights, dividend claims and unlimited upside.
Preferred Stock
A hybrid between a bond and a share: fixed dividends, priority over common stock, usually no vote.
Exchange-Traded Fund
A whole portfolio wrapped into one share that trades all day — the cheapest way to buy a market.
ADR / GDR
A foreign share repackaged to trade on your home exchange, in your currency.
REIT
Own a slice of office towers, warehouses or data centres through a share that pays out most of its rent.
Mutual Fund
The original pooled investment: professional management, one price per day, bought at NAV.
Closed-End Fund
A fund with a fixed share count — so the fund itself trades above or below what it owns, and the gap is the whole game.
SPAC
A listed pile of cash hunting for a company to become — with a money-back guarantee for the patient and a lottery ticket for the hopeful.
Exchange-Traded Note
Tracks an index like an ETF, but it is a bank's promise rather than a pot of assets — and the difference only shows up on the day the bank fails.
Rights Issue
A short-dated option handed to every shareholder for free — and the one corporate action where doing nothing is the only guaranteed way to lose money.
Leveraged & Inverse ETP
A wrapper that delivers a multiple of an index — for one day. Over any longer period it delivers something else entirely, and the gap is arithmetic rather than error.
Equity Derivatives
Contracts whose value derives from stocks and indices — options, swaps and structured payoffs on equity risk.
Equity Option
The right — not the obligation — to buy or sell a stock at a fixed price. The atom of derivatives.
Equity Index Future
A standardised, exchange-traded promise to buy or sell the market at a set price on a set date.
Equity Forward
The bespoke cousin of the future: a private agreement on tomorrow's stock price, tailored to size and date.
Equity Swap
Trade the return of a stock or index against an interest rate — exposure without ownership.
Total Return Swap
One leg pays everything an asset earns — price moves and income — the other pays funding. Ownership economics without ownership.
Variance Swap
A pure bet on how much a market moves — direction irrelevant. Volatility as a tradable asset.
Dividend Future
Trade the dividends a company or index will actually pay in a given year — stripped from the share price.
Warrant
An option in retail packaging — securitised, listed, and buyable in small size through any broker.
Convertible Bond
A bond with an escape hatch into shares: downside of a bond, upside of a stock — priced in between.
Autocallable
The world's best-selling structured product: fat coupons while markets behave, a cliff if they don't.
CFD
Retail's leveraged mirror of any market: pay or receive the price difference, own nothing.
Tracker Certificate
The simplest structured product: one-for-one exposure to an index, with none of the protection and all of the issuer risk. An ETF's payoff wrapped in a bank's credit.
Reverse Convertible
A fat coupon in exchange for the downside of a stock: you are paid handsomely to sell someone crash insurance.
Discount Certificate
Buy the stock below the market price — in exchange for giving away everything above a cap.
Volatility ETP
An exchange-traded wrapper around VIX futures. Designed as a hedge, used as a trade, and structurally guaranteed to bleed in one direction and detonate in the other.
Knock-Out Certificate
Leverage with a trapdoor: a cheap slice of the underlying that dies instantly the moment a barrier is touched.
Dividend Swap
A trade on dividends alone, with the share price removed. The market where structured-product hedging leaves its fingerprints — and the cleanest example of a price set by flow rather than by view.
Employee Stock Option
The most widely held equity derivative on earth — granted, not traded, and misunderstood by most of the people paid in it.
Spread Bet
A leveraged directional bet quoted in currency per point, legally a wager. Economically a CFD; the difference is a tax code and a regulator, and both are jurisdiction-specific.
Binary Option
Pays a fixed amount if a condition is met and nothing otherwise. A legitimate institutional building block, and — in its retail form — a product banned across most of the developed world.
Bonus Certificate
Full upside, plus a guaranteed bonus in flat and mildly falling markets — as long as one line on the chart is never touched.
Factor Certificate
Fixed daily leverage, no knock-out — the certificate that can never be stopped out and can still grind itself to dust.
Capital-Protected Note
Your money back at the end plus some of the upside — where the protection is a zero-coupon bond and the guarantee is only as good as the issuer.
Fixed Income
Debt instruments that pay interest and return principal — from government bonds to securitised credit.
Government Bond
A loan to a state, and the reference price of money itself — the yardstick every other asset is measured against.
Corporate Bond
Lending to companies for a spread: the extra yield is the price of the chance they don't pay you back.
Zero-Coupon Bond
No coupons, one payment: buy at a discount, collect face value at maturity. The purest interest-rate instrument.
Floating Rate Note
A bond whose coupon resets with the market — interest-rate risk engineered out, credit risk left in.
Inflation-Linked Bond
A bond that grows with the price level — real purchasing power, contractually guaranteed.
Covered Bond
Bank debt with a safety net: backed by the bank AND a ring-fenced pool of mortgages. Zero defaults in two centuries of Pfandbriefe.
Mortgage-Backed Security
Thousands of home loans bundled into a bond — with the homeowners' right to refinance baked into your risk.
Asset-Backed Security
Any cash-flowing asset — car loans, credit cards, royalties — sliced into bonds of graded risk.
Municipal Bond
Lending to cities, states and school districts — with the US tax code, not the coupon, doing half the work.
Contingent Convertible Bond
A bank bond with a self-destruct clause: it pays like debt until the bank stumbles — then it becomes equity, or nothing.
High-Yield Bond
Bonds from borrowers the rating agencies doubt — priced somewhere between fixed income and equity, behaving like both.
Sukuk
Not a bond — a certificate of ownership in an asset that generates rent. Economically similar, legally very different, and the difference only shows up when something goes wrong.
Green & Sustainability-Linked Bonds
Debt with a purpose clause: either the money is earmarked for green projects, or the coupon itself bets on the issuer's climate targets.
Emerging Market Bonds
Lending to the developing world — in dollars you'll probably get back, or in pesos that will decide what they're worth later.
CMBS
Securitised loans against offices, malls and hotels. Fewer, larger, lumpier loans than residential — which makes the analysis property-by-property and the tail much thicker.
Callable Bond
A bond the issuer can hand back early — which means you get your money returned exactly when you least want it.
Schuldschein
A loan that behaves like a bond and is documented like a handshake — the German middle market's answer to the capital market.
Rates Derivatives
The largest derivatives market on earth: instruments that transfer interest-rate risk between counterparties.
Interest Rate Swap
Swap fixed interest for floating: the workhorse of global finance, and the largest derivatives market there is.
Overnight Index Swap
A swap against the overnight rate itself — the cleanest read on where central banks are headed.
Forward Rate Agreement
Lock today the interest rate for a loan that starts in the future — one period, one payment, pure simplicity.
Swaption
An option to enter a swap — the instrument through which the market prices interest-rate uncertainty itself.
Cap & Floor
A ceiling or floor on floating interest — insurance against rates going where you can't afford them to.
Bond Future
The exchange-traded proxy for government bonds — and a delivery puzzle that keeps traders honest.
STIR Future
Exchange-traded bets on short-term rates — the deepest, fastest market for central-bank expectations.
Inflation Swap
Fix the inflation rate itself: one side pays realised CPI, the other a rate agreed today.
Basis Swap
Floating against floating: the swap that trades the small print between two interest rates everyone assumed were the same.
Constant Maturity Swap
Pays a long-term rate every quarter — which sounds simple and is where the convexity adjustment was invented.
Credit Derivatives
Instruments that isolate and transfer default risk — insurance-like payoffs on whether a borrower survives.
Credit Default Swap
Insurance on a borrower's default — and the market's sharpest real-time gauge of credit fear.
CDS Index
Default protection on 100+ names in one trade — the S&P 500 of credit risk.
Credit-Linked Note
A bond with a CDS hidden inside: earn an enhanced coupon for carrying someone else's default risk.
CLO
Leveraged corporate loans, tranched into everything from AAA paper to private-equity-style equity.
Leveraged Loan
The senior, secured, floating-rate sibling of the junk bond — and the raw material every CLO is built from.
Asset Swap
A bond with its interest-rate risk surgically removed, leaving pure credit. The package that turns any bond into a floating-rate note and defines the spread the market quotes.
CDO & Synthetic Tranches
Slicing a pool of credit risk into layers of first-loss and last-loss — the machine that concentrated 2008, and the tranche market that outlived it.
CDS Option
An option on the price of credit protection — the instrument that lets you be long the fear of a default without paying for it every day.
Factoring & Receivables Finance
Selling the money your customers owe you, today, at a discount. Financing that follows the invoice rather than the balance sheet — which is why weak companies can use it and why it hides so well.
Foreign Exchange
The deepest market in the world: exchanging one currency for another, today or at a date in the future.
FX Spot
Exchanging one currency for another, settled in two days — the deepest market humanity has built.
FX Forward
Lock an exchange rate for a future date — the corporate world's everyday currency hedge.
Non-Deliverable Forward
A forward for currencies you can't take home — settled in dollars against an official fixing.
FX Swap
Borrow one currency against another: the invisible funding machine underneath global finance, and the one nobody sees.
Cross-Currency Swap
Swap debt from one currency into another for years at a time — principal, interest and all.
FX Future
The exchange-traded twin of the FX forward — same economics, public prices, a clearing house instead of a credit line.
Dual Currency Deposit
A deposit with a headline rate several times the going one, which the bank may repay in a currency you did not want.
FX Derivatives
Optionality on currency pairs — vanilla calls and puts, barriers and digitals on exchange rates.
FX Option
The right to exchange currencies at a set rate — hedging with the upside left open.
FX Barrier Option
Options with trapdoors: touch a barrier level and they spring to life — or vanish, premium and all.
FX Digital Option
All or nothing: a fixed payout if the rate ends (or trades) beyond a level. Probability, directly priced.
FX Accumulator
Buy currency at a discount, week after week — until the market moves, and the contract quietly doubles your obligation at the worst moment.
Target Redemption Forward
A hedge that pays a better rate than the market until it has paid enough — then it stops protecting you and starts multiplying against you.
Quanto Option
An option on a foreign asset that pays in your own currency at a fixed rate. The FX risk vanishes from the payoff and reappears, priced, as a correlation term.
Money Markets
Short-term funding instruments — where banks, corporates and governments borrow for days to a year.
Savings Deposit
The product almost everyone owns and almost nobody analyses: a loan you make to a bank, repayable on demand, at a rate the bank chooses.
Treasury Bill
Government debt measured in weeks: the closest thing in finance to cash that pays interest.
Repo
Sell a bond today, buy it back tomorrow: the secured loan that finances the entire bond market.
Commercial Paper
Corporate IOUs measured in days — how blue-chip companies borrow between bond issues and bank lines.
Certificate of Deposit
A deposit with a term and a rate — the same instrument at the savings branch and on a bank funding desk.
Money Market Fund
The mutual fund that pretends to be a bank account — cash parked in the market's overnight instruments.
Securities Lending
Renting out shares you already own. The invisible plumbing that makes short selling, market making and settlement work — and quietly earns fund holders a few basis points.
Structured Deposit
A deposit whose interest depends on a market. Capital protected by the bank, upside capped by the option budget — and the budget is smaller than the brochure suggests.
Trade Finance
A bank stands between two strangers on opposite sides of the world so that neither has to trust the other. The oldest financial product still in daily use.
Building Society Savings Contract
Save at a below-market rate now to earn the right to borrow at a below-market rate later. A forward-starting mortgage option, sold as a savings account.
Commodities
Raw materials as an asset class — energy, metals and agriculture, traded mostly through futures.
Commodity Future
Standardised contracts on oil, gold, wheat and power — where the physical world sets its prices.
Commodity Option
Optionality on oil, gold and grain — almost always struck on the future, not the physical.
Commodity Swap
Fix the price of a flow: months or years of oil, gas or metal, settled in cash against published indices.
Precious Metals Spot
Gold and silver, bought outright — the oldest financial asset, still trading like a currency without a country.
Commodity ETC / ETP
Commodities in a brokerage account: physical metal or futures strips, wrapped as listed securities.
Carbon Allowances
A commodity invented by law: the right to emit one tonne of CO2, made scarce on purpose and tradable by design.
Electricity Futures
Futures on the one commodity that cannot be stored — where prices go negative at noon and 100× at dinnertime.
Weather Derivative
A contract that settles on the temperature, not on any asset. Invented so an energy company could hedge a warm winter — the purest example of a derivative with no underlying you can own.
Power Purchase Agreement
A long-dated contract to buy electricity at a fixed price — the instrument that decides whether a wind farm gets built at all.
Freight Derivative
A forward on the cost of moving cargo by sea. The most violent price series in commodities, hedged with a contract on an index nobody can deliver.
Alternatives & Private Markets
Beyond public markets: private equity, venture, private credit, hedge funds and insurance-linked securities.
Private Equity Fund
Buy whole companies with borrowed money, improve or re-lever them, sell in five years — finance's ownership business.
Venture Capital
Portfolios of long shots: most investments die, one pays for everything — the power law as an asset class.
Private Credit
The shadow banking success story: funds replaced banks as lenders to the buyout world, and kept growing.
Hedge Fund
Not an asset but a licence: pooled capital free to go long, short, levered and anywhere — strategies as the product.
Catastrophe Bond
Earn double-digit yields for insuring hurricanes — the asset class genuinely uncorrelated with markets.
Infrastructure Funds
Owning the pipes, ports, towers and grids — cash flows measured in decades, contracts measured in inflation clauses.
Annuity
The only product that pays until you die. You are not buying a return — you are buying insurance against outliving your money, and the price is your capital.
Timberland & Farmland
Assets that grow while you wait. The only investment whose inventory increases in volume when you decline to sell it — and the reason institutions treat them as a category of their own.
P2P & Marketplace Loan
Retail investors funding consumer and business loans through a platform. Real credit risk, real yields, and a business model that has repeatedly discovered it was a lender all along.
Venture Debt
Lending to companies that lose money, secured on the expectation that someone else will fund them again. Cheaper than equity for the founder, and a bet on the next round for the lender.
Open-Ended Property Fund
Daily dealing in buildings that take months to sell — the clearest liquidity mismatch anybody still sells to the public.
Litigation Finance
Funding a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the award. Genuinely uncorrelated with markets, entirely correlated with a judge — and priced like a portfolio of binary options.
Royalty Stream
Buying a share of somebody else's revenue, forever or until a patent expires. Top-line exposure with no operating costs — and a valuation that lives or dies on the terminal assumption.
Life Settlement
Buying someone's life insurance policy, paying its premiums, and collecting when they die. Genuinely uncorrelated, and the asset class where the modelling error has a name and a face.
Prediction Market
A contract paying $1 if an event happens and nothing otherwise, so its price reads as a probability. A forecasting instrument that is also, unavoidably, a wagering one.
Unit-Linked Policy
A fund portfolio inside an insurance wrapper. The investment risk is entirely yours; what you bought from the insurer is a tax treatment and a set of fees.
Digital Assets
Cryptoassets and their derivatives — spot coins, perpetual futures and exchange-traded wrappers.
Crypto Spot
Bearer assets on public ledgers — a new asset class still arguing about what it is.
Perpetual Future
Crypto's native derivative: a future that never expires, tethered to spot by a funding rate.
Crypto Option
Calls and puts on bitcoin and ether — vanilla mechanics, triple-digit volatility.
Crypto ETP / ETF
Crypto without the keys: bitcoin and ether wrapped into ordinary brokerage-account securities.
Stablecoin
A dollar that settles like crypto: the token that pegs itself to fiat and quietly became the plumbing of the entire digital-asset market.
Staking & Liquid Staking
Earning the blockchain's own interest rate — and the token that made locked collateral liquid, basis risk included.
Tokenised Treasury
A government bond fund with a blockchain wrapper. The yield comes from the bills; the token contributes settlement speed and a new set of failure points.
CBDC
Central bank money in digital form, held directly by the public. Not a cryptoasset in any meaningful sense — and potentially the largest change to bank funding in a century.
NFT
A unique token recording ownership of a pointer. A genuine technical primitive, a completed speculative cycle, and the clearest recent lesson in what a claim actually consists of.
Liquidity Pool Position
Deposit two assets, earn a share of the trading fees, and discover that your position quietly rebalances into whichever one is losing.
Who does this for a living
The other way through the same material: not what the thing is, but who does it. Six answers to one question — what is this seat's relationship to a price — and 53 seats under them.
Sell-SideQuotes the price and stands behind it.
Buy-SideDecides whether to take it.
BankingTakes the deposit, makes the loan, moves the money.
Retail & Business Banking
Everybody's bank account, and the loans against it.
Corporate & Transaction Banking
A company's bank, for the money and for the plumbing.
The customerThe company every seat above is selling to.
The system around itSets the rules, runs the plumbing, keeps the score.
Central Banks & Supervisors
Sets the rate, and the rules everybody else prices against.
In every firm aboveNot a kind of firm — a kind of seat.
All of it: the industry map interview & desk prep