By the FinLingo Team | Capital markets practitioner, front office experience at a major European investment bank. FinLingo covers 342 lessons from bonds to exotic derivatives. About · Last updated:
Structured products are the most commercially important segment of derivatives. Over €100 billion in annual European issuance. Every cross-asset sales desk distributes them. Every structuring desk builds them. And most finance programs barely cover them. FinLingo fills that gap.
98 units across 11 modules. Foundations (9 units): what a structured product is, who the players are, how issuance works. Capital Protected Products (9 units): CPN decomposition (ZCB + call), participation mechanics, rate sensitivity. Yield Enhancement (11 units): Reverse Convertibles, BRCs, the barrier-coupon nonlinearity. Autocalls (15 units): standard, Step-Down, Snowball, Phoenix. Participation, Rate, FX, Credit, and Hybrid products (50+ units): the full taxonomy.
Every product is taught as a combination of building blocks. An Autocall is not presented as a term sheet to memorise. It is presented as: digital coupons + a down-and-in put + an auto-redemption trigger. A CPN is not "a note with capital protection." It is a zero-coupon bond plus a call option, where the option budget depends on rates and the call price depends on vol. Once you see the bricks, you can build any product.
Theory without practice is a textbook. The Lab includes builders for CPN, BRC, Autocall (4 variants), Phoenix, TARN, CLN, Range Accrual, Cliquet, Worst-Of, and Himalaya. Set the parameters. Watch the payoff change. Run scenarios. Challenge mode tests whether you understand the trade-offs. This is how structurers actually learn — by building, not reading.
Walk into a structuring interview and decompose a Phoenix Autocall with specific numbers: "8% conditional coupon, 80% coupon trigger, 100% autocall trigger, 70% PDI barrier. The memory feature costs roughly 1.5% per annum versus the standard variant. Breakeven: recovering one missed coupon over the product's life." That level of precision is what gets offers.
Capital Protected Notes, Reverse Convertibles, Barrier Reverse Convertibles, Autocallables (standard, Step-Down, Snowball), Phoenix Autocalls, TARN, Range Accruals, Cliquets, Credit Linked Notes, Worst-Of structures, and Himalaya Notes. Each is decomposed into vanilla building blocks and built hands-on in The Lab.
Yes. Structured products are combinations of vanilla derivatives, so you need to understand options (calls, puts, put-call parity), the Greeks (delta, vega), and basic bond math (ZCB pricing, yield curves). FinLingo Levels 1 through 3 cover all prerequisites. Level 1 is free.
Each builder lets you set the product parameters (barrier levels, coupon, maturity, volatility, rates). You see the payoff diagram update in real time. Sandbox mode is for free exploration. Challenge mode gives you a client scenario and asks you to optimise the structure. The builder handles pricing approximations so you can focus on understanding trade-offs.
Learn structured products the way structurers do — by building them. 98 units in Level 5. Level 1 is free.
Start Free