Tag Archives: Medium Term Securities Linked to the UBS V10 Currency Index with Volatility Cap

Never buy a financial product that’s 13 words long, and other lessons from the SEC’s case against UBS

Last week’s $19.5 million settlement between investment bank UBS and securities regulators is just the latest example of why Mom and Pop have no business getting involved with Wall Street’s most convoluted creations.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Oct. 13 that UBS had given investors false or misleading information about the structured debt securities known as “Medium Term Securities Linked to the UBS V10 Currency Index with Volatility Cap.”

Products with interminable names often wind up being products that are too complicated for a math Ph.D. to understand, never mind the average investor. (Or their sometimes hapless brokers, who sometimes whine like babies that they’ve been duped by their firms when products blow up.) You can learn a lot of lessons by examining the flaws in the UBS V10. I talk about those lessons in my latest column for TheStreet, which you can read here.