Yahoo! has climbed to the top three ranking of most featured underlyings in the US market. As a single stock underlying, Yahoo! is now included in 71 individual structured products and is also snugly nestled into the underlying equity basket of 13 additional US structured products, according to SRP data.

That breadth of usage has made Yahoo! the third most featured single equity stock year to date, behind Apple which currently underlies 98 products. However, Yahoo! is still in the shadow of the Facebook share, which now underlies 154 single-equity structured products.

Frequent users
Of the 71 Yahoo single-equity-linked notes, UBS is the issuer of 48 of these, followed by Barclays with 12 structures, RBC with six products and JPMorgan with three. Of the 13 equity share baskets counting Yahoo! among their constituents, 12 of these are wrapped into certificates of deposit that are all issued by Barclays. The remaining one is in the form of a structured note issued by RBC which struck its price this past April.

In contrast, in 2013 Yahoo! was used a mere 30 times as a single equity underlying for structured products, with UBS accounting for 23 of the products issued in the US, with another two each to Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and RBC.

Single equity share underlyings, as a slice of the equity asset class, are still dominating the US structured products market. As of June 20, structured notes linked to the performance of a single stock underlying accounted for $5.3bn in sales – 25% of all structured note sales this year. All told, 2,180 structured products linked to a single equity have been, or expect to be, issued in the US so far this year which represents nearly 45% of all US structured product issuance (4,881 structured products).

Share baskets
Interestingly, when considering those companies that are the individual constituents of equity baskets used as underlyings year-to-date in the US, McDonalds is on the menu 79 times, making it the most used share within a basket, followed by Verizon and Lorillard each being included in 48 equity baskets. Duke Energy follows by being included in 45 baskets, just ahead of AT&T which connects within 44 underlying baskets.

In 2013, Yahoo was used within an equity basket only once, while Verizon was utilized in 205 equity baskets, followed by 157 baskets containing McDonalds, and Walgreens in 149 baskets.