Why this site exists

Search for “structured notes” and you'll find two kinds of content: brochures from the firms that sell them, and warnings that treat every note as a trap. Neither helps you evaluate the note your advisor just showed you.

Here's what both sides skip: roughly 200 new structured notes come to market every month, and they are not interchangeable. Some are genuinely mediocre — low participation, thin protection, an engineered index doing quiet damage under the hood. Others offer terms you simply cannot assemble on your own: a coupon in the teens behind a 50% barrier, or double the S&P 500's return with full principal protection. The difference lives in the term sheet, and reading term sheets is a skill.

That's the job here. Every month we go through the full calendar of new offerings, sort them by what they're built to do — income, growth, growth with protection, or a CD alternative — and publish the short list we'd actually consider, with the reasoning written out. The rest of the site teaches the vocabulary: buffers versus barriers, autocalls, participation rates, issuer credit risk, and the questions worth asking before you commit a dollar.

Minimums start around $1,000, which means these aren't institutional-only tools anymore. The information just hasn't caught up. We're fixing that.