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I think the first question you should ask yourself is what are the fees? Chances are they are much higher than a passively managed ETF and study after study have showed that passively managed funds beat actively managed funds 9 times out of 10. And even better than that you don't need R100k to invest in them. You can invest as little as you can afford. So if you are interested in investing offshore you can invest in the db-x trackers. They have one for the US, the UK, Europe, Japan and one where you can invest in the entire world. The world one is about 58% invested in the US.

Well I guess that is the only upside to the Investec fund. You won't lose any money. But on the downside you will be capped at 55% (fees not included) growth for the entire 3 years. The DBXUS had a return of roughly 30% (fees not included) a year for 3 years running and a total return of 108% (fees not included) compared to where it was 3 years ago. So yeah, with the DBXUS your principle is not protected but your growth is also not capped. I mean if you invested in an Investec type fund three years ago vs DBXUS you would have lost out on almost exactly 50% of the return. So I guess you have to ask yourself some questions:

1. How risk averse are you? If you are VERY risk averse you would want to go with the Investec fund. But also keep in mind, the chances of you getting a negative return on your principle after three full years of being invested in the DBXUS is highly unlikely. Past performance is not guaranteed in the future but I will bet top dollar that after three years you will still be up by some margin.

2. Do you have R100k to invest? If not you do not have much of a choice. Unless you can find a group of people to pool your money together in some way, shape or form and then invest in the Investec fund that way. With that said though I would still rather go with an ETF.

Caveat: I am a newbie investor myself and in now way do I have any formal training or qualifications in the world of finance and investing. What I am giving you here is just the knowledge I have gained myself in the past half year. So you might want to hear from other more experienced people on this forum before you make a choice 

One of my investment rules I picked up from Buffett is not to invest in anything I don't understand, and boy don't I understand this one!

Here's a write-up from the itrade website:
http://isayitradeblog.co.za/structured-products-low-risk-with-gearing/

So, all I know is that this was designed by someone at investec. They're obviously more clued up than I am in products like this, and their goal is to gain investec as much profit as possible. While I might not yet see how they'rte going to do this, I can only assume that it's at the investors expense. If this was a foolproof method of making money investec wouldn't offer it to us, they'd just stick all their money into it.

It kind of reminds me of those forex training schools. If they had a foolproof way to make money they'd do it, they wouldn't offer courses to others as then the others would be their competition. In reality, all they're after is your class fees, or to get you trading on their platform so they can keep your cash once you lose it.