THE STRUCTURED PRODUCT
A note from the Listings Committee on the 4-Flavor Variety Pack
The 4-Flavor Variety Pack is twenty cans. Five Raspberry Lime, five Grapefruit, five Mango Orange, five Lemon. It is sold as a convenience and it functions as a tranche structure.
Three of those four constituents clear the fridge inside a week. One does not. The buyer cannot take delivery of the three without also taking delivery of the fourth, and the fourth has no member bid. Every office on this floor is therefore carrying a standing 25% allocation to an asset it will never consume, purchased involuntarily, at par, in perpetuity, on a recurring order nobody revisits.
This is the whole reason DRIFT exists. Not to complain about lemon. To strip the tranches apart, so the good ones go to people who want them and the bad one goes somewhere other than the back left of a refrigerator on the eleventh floor.
CONSTITUENTS
| Sym | Flavor | Prospectus | Rate | Member bids |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LMON | LemonEquity tranche | carbonated water, lemon juice | 0.11 | 0 |
| GRPF | Grapefruit | carbonated water, grapefruit juice, orange juice, lemon juice, hibiscus | 2.30 | 84 |
| RSPL | Raspberry Lime | carbonated water, raspberry purée, lime juice | 1.57 | 36 |
| MNGO | Mango Orange | carbonated water, mango puree, orange juice, citric acid | 2.57 | 108 |
RELATED INSTRUMENT: THE CITRUS VARIETY PACK
Grapefruit, Lime and Lemon. Three constituents, one of which is lemon, which works out to a 33% forced allocation and makes this the most aggressively structured product in the category. Blended rate 0.89. The Listings Committee rates it junk and notes that it is, in fairness, exactly what it says on the box.
THE REPLACEMENT FLAVORS
The open letter that started all of this proposed two replacements for the lemon slot: Fiji Apple and Pineapple.
Fuji Apple is real, spelled Fuji, and has been on sale the entire time. Pineapple is real and ranked fourth of twenty. Neither appears in any variety pack, which means no office acquires either by accident, which means the two most-wanted assets on this exchange are the two nobody has.
FUJI currently prints 8.01 against 0 cans offered and 198 bid. LMON prints 0.11 against 1,254 offered and 0 bid. The Committee submits that these two numbers, side by side, constitute the entire product brief.