StrikeAndYield crib sheet · information and education only

Equity Derivatives

Contracts whose value derives from stocks and indices — options, swaps and structured payoffs on equity risk.

The shelf — 23 instruments

Plain English 1

The most widely held equity derivative on earth — granted, not traded, and misunderstood by most of the people paid in it.

Needs one idea 11

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.
CFD	Retail's leveraged mirror of any market: pay or receive the price difference, own nothing.
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.
Convertible Bond	A bond with an escape hatch into shares: downside of a bond, upside of a stock — priced in between.
Equity Forward	The bespoke cousin of the future: a private agreement on tomorrow's stock price, tailored to size and date.
Equity Index Future	A standardised, exchange-traded promise to buy or sell the market at a set price on a set date.
Equity Option	The right — not the obligation — to buy or sell a stock at a fixed price. The atom of derivatives.
Knock-Out Certificate	Leverage with a trapdoor: a cheap slice of the underlying that dies instantly the moment a barrier is touched.
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.
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.
Warrant	An option in retail packaging — securitised, listed, and buyable in small size through any broker.

Market knowledge 11

Autocallable	The world's best-selling structured product: fat coupons while markets behave, a cliff if they don't.
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.
Discount Certificate	Buy the stock below the market price — in exchange for giving away everything above a cap.
Dividend Future	Trade the dividends a company or index will actually pay in a given year — stripped from the share price.
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.
Equity Swap	Trade the return of a stock or index against an interest rate — exposure without ownership.
Factor Certificate	Fixed daily leverage, no knock-out — the certificate that can never be stopped out and can still grind itself to dust.
Reverse Convertible	A fat coupon in exchange for the downside of a stock: you are paid handsomely to sell someone crash insurance.
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.
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.

What moves prices here

Implied against realised volatility — The gap is the whole trade
Dealer positioning in gamma — It can damp a move or amplify it, and which one flips
Time — One-directional, and accelerating at the end
The skew — Downside strikes carry a higher implied volatility
Dividends and borrow — They move the forward, and so every strike
Expiry mechanics — Open interest concentrates at round strikes

The calendar

Third Friday, monthly	Standard expiry
Quarterly	Triple witching
Daily near expiry	Weekly and daily-expiry contracts
Earnings dates	Event volatility
Ex-dividend dates	Early exercise of American calls

Which risk decides, across the shelf

Failure mode	Decides	Share
Market	21 of 23	91%
Credit	9 of 23	39%
Liquidity	1 of 23	4%
Funding	5 of 23	22%
Operational	4 of 23	17%

Counted from the same table each product page prints. Not a rating and not a ranking: there is deliberately no total.