Fruit shake
"When is an Apple an Orange?" was the rhetorical question posed in a speech made early this year by one of London's more prominent structured products bankers. The answer is, of course, never. You can't dial up friends or surf the internet on an orange. You can't store all your phone numbers; you can't write yourself notes; you don't even have a calendar on an orange.
You can do all these things and more on an Apple, and its snazzy i-phone. And impressive as all the phone, writing and storage applications are, you have to be overcome by a phone that now doubles up as a spirit level. Probably quite useless to almost all, but what a gadget.
So why can't you trade on exchanges using the phone and, more to the point, why can't you buy an application that creates whatever structured product you would like. Well you can, or you could, if the creators spent a little less time inventing spirit levels and clever advertising campaigns.
It is not a myth in any way. There are banks - and UBS is prominent among them - that have design your own structured products packages. In terms of technology we are streets ahead of where we were 10 years ago. When this all comes about, the man next to you may not be texting his mum, playing dingbat death or solitaire, he may be constructing his very own structured product. Only qualified investors need apply, and the only people that need to be worried are the bankers that the world's latest widget will make redundant.
