<prompt> Human: My personal banker recently recommended an investment product to me. It was a 5 year locked up investment where at the end of this period, I will receive 100 of my investment or my investment times the percentage change on a basket of indexes. The management fee for this product was 0.00.This sounded way too good to be true, so I looked into it. The trick is they define the percentage change on the basket of index to be the index level at the end index level today - 1. Index levels do not contain re-invested dividends. So this is not the total return of the index.To boot, the portfolio of indexes was 50 high yield index, 25 financial stocks index, and 25 SP500 index. So they are effectively taking the dividends out of a very high dividend portfolio, buying put options in a low volatility market this means the options are cheap even for long maturities, and pocketing the difference. I think the weighted dividend yield would be around 5... so for 5 years ... 25 of my principle is gone.this made me a little angry and I wanted to share here.  <response>: A majority of financial suggestions - especially at big corporate banks - are made in the interest of the bank andor the paycheck of the person whos lips are moving...But kudos to you for researching before jumping all in. 