Illiquid Financial products and distribution policies: new insights

Both changing investors’ behaviour and contingent events, such as financial crisis,stimulated a debate around the distribution of financial products for which anactive market doesn’t exist. Investing in illiquid financial instruments requires acertain degree of financial education in order to proper understand all the risksentailed by the investment. Less expert investors lack the basic tools forevaluating more complex structures and liquidity costs; this, in turn, leaves roomfor opportunistic behaviours by intermediaries. New regulations are targeted toimprove risk-based transparency standards and set tighter conduct of businessrules for intermediaries’ commercial policies. Nevertheless, some important issuesstill remain on the desk requiring better insight. Conceptually, more transparencysurely would benefit investors. However bounded rationality would impede lessexperts investors to properly understand all the information provided. Thequestion we want to addressed deals with the effectiveness of a risk basedtransparency regulation.