During the soccer World Cup of June 1998, the equity derivatives team at London investment bank Warburg Dillon Read cooked up a new product, and called it Goal. "We wanted to be able to shout 'Goal!' across the dealing room," explains one of the inventors. The team couldn't find any English financial terms to fit the desired acronym, so they resorted to German: Geld- oder Aktienlieferung, which means delivery in cash or shares.
The full name is a clue to the product's real importance. Not just a tonic for football fever, Goals met an urgent need at Warburg to profit from the volatility of equities by holding more options.
Goals are reverse convertibles, which involve investors buying a high-coupon bond in exchange for granting the bond issuer an equity put option. Warburg sells its Goals structures to commercial banks around Europe, including its parent company UBS, and these banks then market the product to retail clients. Last November, for example, end-users bought a Dm150 million ($66 million) two-year bond paying 10.25%, in exchange for risking redemption in Siemens shares if the stock fell below 97.75%