Ed Clissold (pictured), chief US strategist, Ned Davis Research Group started the day with the warning, borrowed from John Maynard Keynes, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". If it wasn't for tax cuts, this year's story would be all about earnings deceleration, "but recession risk are low," according to Clissold. Referring to a slide of a 1992 advert from Radio Shack advertising products on a sale in celebration of the President's birthday, Clissold noted that all the products pictured - a TV, stereo, home computer and telephone are now "all contained in your mobile... The price of stuff is still going down".

Furthermore, "we have worked off some of the optimism and the rallies have been anaemic," according to the strategist.

Tiago Fernandes, managing director of SRP, relayed a multitude of statistical data, which included an observation that a 17% negative performance in 2016 turned into a 2% negative performance in 2017, before wowing the audience by mentioning a sighting of a reverse convertible with a snowball feature.

Jason Broder, managing director, head of third party distribution and Simon platform at Goldman Sachs said that we can't do this business all hand to hand, we need technology. "Lots of pain points exist in the structured products market," said Broder.

Biju Kulathakal (below), co-founder and chief executive officer at Halo said it was a very small number of enthusiastic purchasers of structured products who watch all the videos and read all the educational material. "Financial advisers are really good at making friends," said Kulathakal.

"Impact before profit," said Kulathakal.

Tom Haines, senior vice president, capital markets and index solutions at Annexus said we need to reevaluate our solutions. "There is a big dilemma in the retirement market - it is underfunded and there is a danger that social security will run out," said Haines.

Daniel Yang, partner at Alaia Capital, said retail investors see structured products as intimidating, such as Phoenix autocallables. "We use plain language and have eliminated 'structured' from our marketing," said Yang.

"UITs are required as a complement to structured products, because the banks are not going to issue twice the debt," said Yang.

Rahul Saito, director of sales, North America at Stoxx talked about his new artificial intelligence index and his do-it-yourself index thingy.

There was a legal onslaught after lunch during which Stephanie Nicolas, partner at Wilmerhale, reminded that seven years ago the US Securities and Exchange Commission talked about the adoption of a universal style for investment advisers and broker-dealers when it came to exercising their fiduciary responsibilities. "The best interests of retail investors is impossible to define," said Nicolas.

"Financial incentives that may be impossible to mitigate may include trips and prizes," said Nicolas, presenting some bad news ahead of the SRP Awards Dinner later the same day.

The legalities were sustained by Tom Selman, executive vice president, regulatory policy and legal compliance officer at Finra and Anna Pinedo, partner at Mayer Brown, who produced an excellent examination of regulation technology. You can use games to test risk aversion, so there is some fun remaining.

According to Jerome Cloutier (above), managing director and Canadian head of sales, global structured products at BMO Capital Markets, speaking on the Art of Distribution panel, said that a lot of products had been built that stroked structurers' egos.

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