What are alternative assets?
Alternative assets, which include any non-publicly traded assets (private market alternatives), are financial assets that do not fall into conventional investment categories: stocks, bonds, or cash.
And they may be an option answer for more robust returns than public markets alone can offer.
Alternative assets can help build a diversified portfolio, may work well for those with longer investment time horizons, and have demonstrated strong performances in recent decades.
There is a wealth of alternative assets to explore:
- Venture capital
- Private equity
- Real estate, including farmland
- Loans
- Digital assets
- Commodities
- Infrastructure
- Fine art
- Collectibles
- Fine wine and rare spirits
While alternative assets have the potential to yield high returns, they have long been largely limited in availability to institutional investors and high net-worth individuals. That’s because institutions and extremely wealthy individuals have significantly more resources and risk insulation and because investing in alternative assets has historically been a time-consuming, complicated, and expensive process.
Nowadays, these barriers are being lowered, and sophisticated individual investors can now use IRA savings to invest in these assets.
