Hybrid securities are a broad group of securities that combine the elements of the two broader groups of securities, debt and equity.

Hybrid securities pay a predictable (fixed or floating) rate of return or dividend until a certain date, at which point the holder has a number of options including converting the securities into the underlying share.

Therefore, unlike a share of stock (equity) the holder has a 'known' cash flow, and, unlike a fixed interest security (debt) there is an option to convert to the underlying equity. More common examples include convertible and converting preference shares.

A hybrid security is structured differently and while the price of some securities behave more like fixed interest securities, others behave more like the underlying shares into which they convert.

Traditional hybrids were usually structured in a way that leads the securities to react to the underlying share price. Although each has individual characteristics, typically:

Note: This fixed conversion ratio means the price of these hybrids react to the movement in the underlying share price. (The extent of the co-relation is sometimes referred to as a delta, and these typically have a delta of between 0.5 and 1) In addition, some of these securities include minimum and maximum conversion terms, effectively giving the holder a put and call option if the share price reaches a certain prices.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.