Compare

Product pages explain one instrument at a time. These put two or three side by side and state the trade-off explicitly — including the cases where the answer is "neither, for this job". No page here concludes that one option is simply better, because none of them is. Education only, as everywhere here — see the disclaimer.

The comparisons

• ETF vs. Fund vs. Certificate — three wrappers that can deliver an identical index return and put you in three completely different positions when something fails. Includes the dividend gap nobody prices.
• Options vs. Futures vs. CFDs — three ways to take a leveraged view, with one structural difference that decides everything: only one of them caps what you can lose.
• Individual Bonds vs. Bond Funds — one matures and one does not. Whether holding to maturity really protects you, and the constant-duration difference that makes them non-substitutes.
• Physical vs. Synthetic ETFs — one owns the shares, one owns a swap. Why the synthetic version is often the better tracker, and the withholding-tax reason that actually drives it.
• Deposit vs. Money Market Fund vs. T-Bill — four ways to hold cash, each trading one comfort for one improvement. Small differences in normal times, decisive in a bank failure.
• Active vs. Passive — the part that is arithmetic rather than opinion, what the evidence does and does not establish, and the genuine structural weaknesses on both sides.
• Currency-Hedged vs. Unhedged — why the answer is close to settled for bonds and genuinely open for equities, and what a hedged share class does not do.
• Fixed vs. Floating Rate — one fixes the cash flow and leaves the value open; the other does the reverse. Including the credit-spread duration that an FRN does not remove.
• Warrant vs. Turbo vs. Listed Option — three leveraged wrappers on the same share. One is cleared, two are promises, and only one prices where you can see it.
• Four Ways to Own Gold — bars, an ETC, a future and mining shares. Two of the four behave like gold, and the fourth is an equity sector wearing the word.
• Accumulating vs. Distributing Share Classes — same fund, two ISINs. What genuinely differs, what only appears to, and why the tax dimension decides it in some jurisdictions and nothing in others.
• Market vs. Limit vs. the Other Order Types — one trade-off underneath all of them, why a resting limit order is an option you wrote, and why stops fail exactly when they matter.

How to use a comparison page

• Start from the job, not the product. "Which is better" has no answer; "which fits matching a payment in seven years" has a clear one.
• Read the structural difference first. Cost differences are measured in basis points and structural differences in whether you are repaid at all.
• Check what each side understates. Every comparison here has a section for it, because both camps in these arguments leave the same things out.
• Then price it. The calculators turn each comparison into a number for your own horizon and size.

For reading the documents behind these products, see the playbooks; for the mechanisms underneath them, the concepts.