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Alternative investment

 
Wikipedia: Alternative investment

An alternative investment is an investment product other than traditional investments such as stocks, bonds or cash.

This broad definition makes it impossible to list all alternative strategies, but the most important areas are real estate, private equity, venture capital,commodities, and hedged or absolute return strategies. Wine, art and antiques, indeed any business of value, might also be considered as an alternative investment.

One common theme to alternative investments is that they are often hoped to have modest correlations with traditional investments and so to increase the diversification of investor's portfolios.

Common Features

Sharp, Alexander and Bailey(1999) provide a nice summary of the common features of alternative investments.

  • Illiquidity
  • Difficulty in determining current market values
  • Limited historical risk and return data
  • Extensive investment analysis required

External links


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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alternative investment" Read more