Why this site exists

Every month, roughly 135 to 200 new structured notes hit the new-issue calendar. They are not interchangeable. Some are genuinely mediocre: low participation, thin protection, an engineered index doing quiet damage under the hood. Others offer terms you simply cannot assemble on your own, like a coupon in the teens behind a 50% barrier, or double the S&P 500's return with full principal protection. The difference lives in the term sheet, and nobody advising clients has time to read 200 term sheets a month.

That's the job here. Every month we read the full calendar, sort each note by the job it was built to do (income, growth, growth with protection, or a CD alternative), and run every note through the same screening criteria. The criteria are published in every issue, so you can see exactly why a note passed or got cut, disagree with the filters, and apply your own judgment on top. The screen narrows the stack; the selection is always yours.

The rest of the site is the reference shelf: buffers versus barriers, autocalls, participation rates, engineered indices, issuer credit risk, and the tax quirks that change what a client actually keeps. It's written to be useful in a due-diligence file and clear enough to hand to a client who asks how the thing works.

Structured Notes Lab is written by Titu Bhowmick. It is an independent publication: no issuer, distributor, or platform pays for coverage, and no note is included or excluded for any reason other than its terms. Nothing here is a recommendation. It's a record of what the screen found and why, so the professionals choosing from this calendar can start from a short list instead of the whole stack.