The Alternative Answer: The Nontraditional Investments That Drive the World's Best-Performing Portfolios

by Bob Rice

Overview

The first book to explain the new world of alternative investing, showing how anyone can use nontraditional options to significantly increase returns and lower risks

The world's elite investors have long relied on alternative investments to produce superior returns. Until now, these strategies were the exclusive purview of institutions and the superwealthy, but today any informed investor can play the same game.

A rainbow of investment options—timber, start-ups, master limited partnerships (MLPs), hedged strategies, managed futures, infrastructure, peer-to-peer lending, farmland, and dozens of other nontraditional strategies—can provide dramatically better gains, with less total risk, than the standard choices. In The Alternative Answer, Bob Rice, Bloomberg TV's Alternative Investments Editor, leads an entertaining and easy- to-understand tour of this world, and suggests specific alternative investments for all four key "jobs" of a portfolio: safely generating more current income, decreasing risks of economic shocks, significantly increasing long-term profits, and protecting purchasing power over time.

Regardless of experience or net worth, readers will learn exactly how to substantially improve investment performance—in the same way that the world's best investors already do. Stocks and bonds alone aren't nearly enough. Investors need an alternative answer and now they have it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062257901
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/14/2013
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Bob Rice is Bloomberg TV's Alternative Investments Editor, the managing partner at Tangent Capital, and a board member of investment advisors with more than $2 billion under management. The positions he has held throughout his multifaceted career have spanned many domains: Wall Street law firm partner; public company CEO; trial lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice; and technology entrepreneur.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 The Alternative Manifesto 1

2 Do Alternatives Work? 11

3 Major Alternative Strategies 29

4 Major Alternative Structures 53

5 Higher, Inflation-Protected Current Income (Job 1) 75

6 Broadening the Base for Risk Reduction (Job 2) 101

7 Long-Term Growth Enhancement (Job 3) 129

8 Purchase Power Protection (Job 4) 155

9 The Big Picture 183

10 At the Dealership 207

Conclusion: It's Time! 227

Acknowledgments 229

Glossary 231

Resources 261

Editorial Reviews

For decades, investors have taken the “safe” route (“long-only domestic stock and bond portfolios”), which has proven inadequate in today’s economy. How then to invest, when stocks, bonds, and the economy are all tanking? Rice, alternative investment editor of Bloomberg TV, advocates strategies that have been making money for wealthy investors since the ’80s, and that are now available to all. Using alternative methods, investors can increase current income and bulletproof their portfolios against the next economic decline. These plans—based on investment in managed futures, real assets, venture funds, companies based in emerging economies, and natural resources—are effective because, as time passes, “a portfolio of them deliver and more diverse streams... than do standard investments.” Rice takes readers through a crash course in alternative investments and the creation of a “panoramic, risk tolerant portfolio” and how typical investors can take a better tack. Rice lucidly explains complex investment strategies and less familiar financial terms, and the book is worth buying for the clear, cogent glossary and finance tutorial alone. While most readers will be skeptical about a plan that departs this much from the accepted wisdom, this is a great start for the adventurous. (May)

Publishers Weekly