Other Alternative Investments - Articles & White Papers

Alternative investments are attracting ever more investors. According to the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) Association, between 2003 and 2018, the size of the global investment market doubled, while alternative investments almost tripled to USD 13.4 trillion. This would mean around 12% of worldwide…

Cryptocurrencies have attracted widespread interest among private investors and even some hedge funds as a vehicle for speculation. But what’s their role in a portfolio — growth engine or diversifier? State Street explores the potential role of bitcoin in multi-asset portfolios based on their track record for diversifying…

Ray Dalio and members of his Bridgewater team explore the merits of Bitcoin as a storehold of wealth. They acknowledge that this financial vehicle is only a decade old and it remains to be seen whether, in absolute terms, it can compete with other storeholds of wealth such as gold.

Following another eventful year in reinsurance, Neuberger Berman offers a primer on catastrophe bonds — a growing and genuinely diversifying asset class that they believe is attractively valued.

In this episode of The Investment Podcast, Riccardo Cumerlato Client Director at M&G Investments sits down with Fund Manager Andrew Amos to talk about an innovative investment in the area of music copyright royalties and how M&G Investments has taken a differentiated approach to investing in the asset class.

Over the past three decades, a sustained surge in inflation has been absent in developed markets. As a result, investors are faced with the challenge of having little evidence on how to reposition their portfolios in the face of heighted inflation risk. The authors provide some guidance by analysing both passive and active…

India relies on the annual monsoon for more than 50% of the water required for agriculture. Consequently, a monsoon "failure" not only reduces food grain production but also subtracts 2-5% percentage points from India's annual GDP. Even more developed countries like Australia and the U.S. with generally dependable water…

WisdomTree discusses the investment thesis for Bitcoin with Ari Paul, the co-founder of Blacktower Capital, a crypto asset focussed asset management firm.

The recent rapid ascent of cryptocurrencies over the past year has captured the attention of investors. Often, investments in cryptos are equated to investments in gold. Despite some apparent similarities, we believe that gold stands apart from cryptocurrencies, both fundamentally and practically.

Commercial real estate investors prefer coastal, gateway, markets for liquidity, demand density, and durable returns. Yet, these areas are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change from more intense and frequent weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons as well as to gradual changes such as sea-level rise.…

Bitcoin is often derided as being highly volatile, but as digital gold it could play a role in a multi-asset portfolio, says investor Jeroen Blokland.

Mainstream adoption of technology occurs when a system is robust and its value is recognised by the public. To quantify these measures, let’s talk about utility value and speculative value. Both factors are essential in advancing a system’s expansion – utility value is unsubstantiated if the speculative value doesn’t grow.…

Bitcoin has been described as digital gold. Bitcoin is exactly like gold except when it isn’t. Over millennia, gold has gained a questionable reputation as an inflation hedge, a store of value and a safe haven. Gold’s price can arguably be decomposed into a “golden constant” fair price and a fair price deviation. Bitcoin has…

Tokenisation is the process of creating a digital representation of a non-digital asset, with the potential to democratise access to alternative investments. Listen in as Joanne Murphy, Jack Wu, CFA, Emmanuelle Pecenicic, and Adrian Lai take a focused look at Tokenisation and discuss the recently published research on The…

Bitcoin wurde von der Investment-Community eingehend geprüft. Die Tatsache, dass der Preis auf 58.350 USD gestiegen ist - fast dreimal höher als der Höchststand von 2017 - hat die Aufmerksamkeit der Menschen geweckt.

I bitcoin sono nel mirino della comunità degli investimenti che ne segue gli sviluppi con molta attenzione. Il fatto che il suo prezzo abbia avuto un'impennata stratosferica balzando a 58,350 dollari, ossia un valore di quasi tre volte maggiore rispetto al picco del 2017, ha attirato l'attenzione del pubblico.

Pensions remain significantly underfunded and risks continue to build in their investment portfolios, particularly within public fixed income. Although there is no quick fix or easy way out, private debt offers a potential reprieve that pensions can act on near-term to improve investment returns and chip away at their…

The now ubiquitous bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are creating a decentralized, alternative global financial system. Hoping to push back against the competition, central banks, led by the People’s Bank of China, are investigating what it would take to launch their own digital currencies.

In only a few years, central bank digital currencies (CBDC) have gone from a fringe idea promoted by cryptocurrency bloggers to an idea now seriously explored by 80% of the world’s major central banks, including the People’s Bank of China and the United States Federal Reserve. This paper gives an overview of the drive at the…

The term decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to an alternative financial infrastructure built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. DeFi uses smart contracts to create protocols that replicate existing financial services in a more open, interoperable, and transparent way. This article highlights opportunities and potential…