IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ise/isegwp/wp192017.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Investor in Structured Retail Products: Marketing Driven or Gambling Oriented?

Author

Listed:
  • Margaria Abreu
  • Victor Mendes

Abstract

Structured retail products (SRP) are one of the most visible faces of financial innovation and are becoming increasingly popular amongst retail investors. However, there is strong consensus that retail investors’ preference for structured products is difficult to explain using the standard rational theory, those products being in general sold at a significant premium. Studying the actual trading behavior of individual investors we provide evidence consistent with the view that SRP likely offer value to some informed investors compared to other products, that product complexity is a way to complete markets and that SRP allow investors to access segments otherwise not available to them. Nonetheless, our results also suggest that the increasing popularity of SRP is deeply related to investors’ behavioral biases, particularly overconfidence and gambling. Moreover, results also show that SRP trading activity cannot be dissociated from aggressive marketing practices. Key Words: structured retail products; behavioral finance; overconfidence; gambling; marketing

Suggested Citation

  • Margaria Abreu & Victor Mendes, 2017. "The Investor in Structured Retail Products: Marketing Driven or Gambling Oriented?," Working Papers Department of Economics 2017/19, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa.
    • Handle: RePEc:ise:isegwp:wp192017
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://depeco.iseg.ulisboa.pt/wp/wp192017.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daniel Dorn & Gur Huberman, 2005. "Talk and Action: What Individual Investors Say and What They Do," Review of Finance, Springer, vol. 9(4), pages 437-481, December.
    2. Döbeli, Barbara & Vanini, Paolo, 2010. "Stated and revealed investment decisions concerning retail structured products," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(6), pages 1400-1411, June.
    3. Laurent E. Calvet & John Y. Campbell & Paolo Sodini, 2009. "Fight or Flight? Portfolio Rebalancing by Individual Investors," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(1), pages 301-348.
    4. Joshua D. Coval & Tyler Shumway, 2005. "Do Behavioral Biases Affect Prices?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(1), pages 1-34, February.
    5. John Y. Campbell, 2006. "Household Finance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(4), pages 1553-1604, August.
    6. William N. Goetzmann & Alok Kumar, 2008. "Equity Portfolio Diversification," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 12(3), pages 433-463.
    7. Marta Szymanowska & Jenke Ter Horst & Chris Veld, 2009. "Reverse convertible bonds analyzed," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(10), pages 895-919, October.
    8. Annamaria Lusardi & Olivia S. Mitchell, 2017. "How Ordinary Consumers Make Complex Economic Decisions: Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness," Quarterly Journal of Finance (QJF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 7(03), pages 1-31, September.
    9. Bruce Ian Carlin & Gustavo Manso, 2009. "Obfuscation, Learning, and the Evolution of Investor Sophistication," NBER Working Papers 14954, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar, 2009. "Optimal financial education," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 1-9, January.
    11. Charlotte Christiansen & Juanna Schröter Joensen & Jesper Rangvid, 2008. "Are Economists More Likely to Hold Stocks?," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 12(3), pages 465-496.
    12. Konstantinos Kiriakopoulos & Theodoros Mavralexakis, 2011. "Structured Bonds and Greek Demons. Is the attack †fair†?," Journal of Applied Finance & Banking, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 1(2), pages 1-12.
    13. Alen Nosić & Martin Weber, 2010. "How Riskily Do I Invest? The Role of Risk Attitudes, Risk Perceptions, and Overconfidence," Decision Analysis, INFORMS, vol. 7(3), pages 282-301, September.
    14. Andreas Grünbichler & Hanspeter Wohlwend, 2005. "The Valuation of Structured Products: Empirical Findings for the Swiss Market," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 19(4), pages 361-380, December.
    15. Brad M. Barber & Yi-Tsung Lee & Yu-Jane Liu & Terrance Odean, 2009. "Just How Much Do Individual Investors Lose by Trading?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(2), pages 609-632, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Margarida Abreu & Victor Mendes, 2018. "Do Individual Investors Trade Differently in Different Markets?," Working Papers REM 2018/26, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa.
    2. Lammer, Dominique Marcel & Hanspal, Tobin & Hackethal, Andreas, 2020. "Who are the Bitcoin investors? Evidence from indirect cryptocurrency investments," SAFE Working Paper Series 277, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    3. Ana Brochado & Margarida Abreu & Victor Mendes, 2020. "Correlates of Gambling," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 40(1), pages 456-462.
    4. Christian Bauer & Marc Oliver Rieger, 2021. "The Slow Death of Capital Protection," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-8, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Abreu, Margarida & Mendes, Victor, 2018. "The investor in structured retail products: Advice driven or gambling oriented?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(C), pages 1-9.
    2. Margarida Abreu, 2017. "How Biased is the Behavior of the Individual Investor in Warrants?," Working Papers REM 2017/07, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa.
    3. Margaria Abreu, 2017. "HOW Biased is the Behavior of the Individual Investor in Warrants?," Working Papers Department of Economics 2017/18, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa.
    4. Abreu, Margarida, 2019. "How biased is the behavior of the individual investor in warrants?," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 139-149.
    5. Margarida Abreu & Victor Mendes, 2018. "Do Individual Investors Trade Differently in Different Markets?," Working Papers REM 2018/26, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa.
    6. Guiso, Luigi & Sodini, Paolo, 2013. "Household Finance: An Emerging Field," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1397-1532, Elsevier.
    7. Raslan Alzuabi & Sarah Brown & Mark N. Harris & Karl Taylor, 2024. "Modelling the composition of household portfolios: A latent class approach," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 57(1), pages 243-275, February.
    8. Barber, Brad M. & Odean, Terrance, 2013. "The Behavior of Individual Investors," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1533-1570, Elsevier.
    9. Jakusch, Sven Thorsten & Meyer, Steffen & Hackethal, Andreas, 2019. "Taming models of prospect theory in the wild? Estimation of Vlcek and Hens (2011)," SAFE Working Paper Series 146, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, revised 2019.
    10. Milo Bianchi, 2018. "Financial Literacy and Portfolio Dynamics," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 73(2), pages 831-859, April.
    11. Meyer, Steffen & Urban, Linda & Ahlswede, Sophie, 2015. "Does a personalized feedback on investment success mitigate investment mistakes of private investors? Answers from large natural field experiment," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 112988, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    12. Abreu, Margarida & Mendes, Victor, 2012. "Information, overconfidence and trading: Do the sources of information matter?," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 868-881.
    13. Maximilian Koestner & Benjamin Loos & Steffen Meyer & Andreas Hackethal, 2017. "Do individual investors learn from their mistakes?," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 87(5), pages 669-703, July.
    14. Grinblatt, Mark & Keloharju, Matti & Linnainmaa, Juhani T., 2012. "IQ, trading behavior, and performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(2), pages 339-362.
    15. Laurent E. Calvet & Paolo Sodini, 2014. "Twin Picks: Disentangling the Determinants of Risk-Taking in Household Portfolios," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(2), pages 867-906, April.
    16. Sandra E Black & Paul J Devereux & Petter Lundborg & Kaveh Majlesi, 2018. "Learning to Take Risks? The Effect of Education on Risk-Taking in Financial Markets," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 22(3), pages 951-975.
    17. Laurent E. Calvet & John Y. Campbell & Paolo Sodini, 2009. "Measuring the Financial Sophistication of Households," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 393-398, May.
    18. Grohmann, Antonia, 2018. "Financial literacy and financial behavior: Evidence from the emerging Asian middle class," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 129-143.
    19. Kacperczyk, Marcin & Nosal, Jaromir & Stevens, Luminita, 2019. "Investor sophistication and capital income inequality," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 18-31.
    20. Oscar A. Stolper & Andreas Walter, 2017. "Financial literacy, financial advice, and financial behavior," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 87(5), pages 581-643, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    structured retail products; behavioral finance; overconfidence; gambling; marketing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G02 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Behavioral Finance: Underlying Principles
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G41 - Financial Economics - - Behavioral Finance - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making in Financial Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ise:isegwp:wp192017. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Vitor Escaria (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://aquila.iseg.ulisboa.pt/aquila/departamentos/EC .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.