Alternative Investments

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

This broad definition makes it impossible to list all alternative strategies, but the most common alternative investments are in real estate, private equity, venture capital, commodities, and hedged or absolute return strategies. Exotic investments in wine, art and antiques are also alternative investments.

A common theme to alternative investments is that they generally have modest correlation with traditional investments and provide diversification to investors’ portfolios.

Clearly, some alternative investments are riskier than others. While the entire field of alternative investing is sometimes incorrectly painted as “very risky” by professionals in more traditional investment circles, it is in fact the nature of specific alternative investments that make them risky, not the fact that they are alternative investments.

At Westcourt Capital, as our credo indicates, it is our mandate to focus only on conservative alternative investments, leaving the more exotic forms of alternative investing to others. Without exception, when we recommend alternative investments, our clients will understand the nature of the investments, how they create distributable cash, and how they can increase in value over time. When investors understand their investments, they have more confidence in the process and are always more satisfied over the long term.