Journal of Applied Finance & Banking

Illiquid Financial products and distribution policies: new insights

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• Abstract

  Both changing investors’ behaviour and contingent events, such as financial crisis, stimulated a debate around the distribution of financial products for which an active market doesn’t exist. Investing in illiquid financial instruments requires a certain degree of financial education in order to proper understand all the risks entailed by the investment. Less expert investors lack the basic tools for evaluating more complex structures and liquidity costs; this, in turn, leaves room for opportunistic behaviours by intermediaries. New regulations are targeted to improve risk-based transparency standards and set tighter conduct of business rules for intermediaries’ commercial policies. Nevertheless, some important issues still remain on the desk requiring better insight. Conceptually, more transparency surely would benefit investors. However bounded rationality would impede less experts investors to properly understand all the information provided. The question we want to addressed deals with the effectiveness of a risk based transparency regulation.