SLCG Offers Free Structured Products Research and Analysis

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Securities Litigation and Consulting Group, Inc. ("SLCG") has launched a dramatic new initiative to provide sophisticated analysis of retail structured products free of charge from its website www.slcg.com.  The SLCG website contains academic, legal and regulatory literature relevant to the retail structured products sold in the United States.  

SLCG's founder, Dr. Craig McCann, has long been a vocal critic of retail structured products.  In 2006, Dr. McCann co-authored one of the first working papers questioning whether retail structured products were ever suitable investments.  Since 2006, Dr. McCann has continued to publish structured products research and speak about his concerns at legal and academic conferences.  He has said "The packaging of the underlying note and option components into a retail structured product is not the problem.  The packaging is spuriously complex so as to hide extraordinarily high embedded costs that make these horrible investments.  Reverse convertibles, in particular, have such high embedded costs that they're expected returns are negative despite credit risk, liquidity risk and stock market exposure and should never have been sold to retail investors in the US."

The SLCG website currently contains "tear sheets" for over 1,500 retail structured products issued in the US between January 1, 2010 and September 30, 2010.  According to Dr. McCann "SLCG's structured products initiative has been a year-long effort and we are committed to continuously updating our valuation of retail structured products in the US.  Each month we will add tear sheets for newly issued structured products and will expand the variety of products we cover without charge in the hopes that investors and advisors can get a more complete understanding of this type of investment."

SLCG's structured products website can be found at http://www.slcg.com/products.php.

Securities Litigation and Consulting Group, Inc. ("SLCG") is a financial economics consulting firm based in the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, DC. SLCG provides consulting services and expert witnesses to law firms, publicly-traded corporations, banks, brokerage firms and individuals involved in complex litigation throughout the United States. SLCG's staff includes PhD, MA and BA level professionals with academic, industry and government experience. Its experts have testified in state and federal court and in various arbitration forums.

For further information about SLCG or its research, please contact Dr. McCann at 703-246-9381 and [email protected] or visit us at http://www.slcg.com.

SOURCE Securities Litigation and Consulting Group, Inc.