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First and foremost, structured products are investment products sold to retail investors usually by banks through bank relationships managers. Despite going by different names and advertised rates of return, financial products that fall under the category of structured products usually contain certain characteristics.
1. Difficulty in accessing how underlying assets performed – An internet connection or access to a recent copy of the WSJ are the only requirements to track an index and if the underlying is a basket of stocks then the prospectus will provide the holdings and the investor can simply get individual quotes for each stock.
2. No market value when need to cash out before holding period ends and upside gains – There are literally dozens of banks that actively issue and trade Structured Products. There is an active secondary market and you can always get a bid/ask on a SP .

3. Unclear risks – Honestly this is so poorly written that I don’t know where to begin.

4. Ususally higher risks for less than required returns. – This is not true. Structured Products almost always have principal protection which means they would have less risk not more. Even if a SP had no principal protection it would still just have the same risk as the underlying, not more. Your casino analogy literally makes zero sense. If you’ re going to make a bold analogy like that you should at least try to provide some evidence that it applies.

This asset class has taken an unfair hit to the chin b/c Lehman bet their future on mortgage backed securities. The last thing that this industry needs is hacks like you writing articles.