Financial advisors and the ETF business will gather online Wednesday for the Alts Virtual Summit to discuss how investors are using alternative strategies to diversify and boost performance.
Most individual investors traditionally have been focused on long-only strategies such as the well-worn 60/40 split between stocks and bonds. However, the financial crisis and market volatility of recent years have caused more investors to seek out strategies that limit risk and volatility.
In other words, alternative strategies are no longer confined to hedge funds and extremely wealthy investors. Now, more individual investors are using alternative assets to smooth out risk and generate alpha when the bond and equity markets aren’t doing as well.
Meanwhile, asset managers and hedge funds recognize the demand for alternative strategies in liquid vehicles such as ETFs.
At the most basic level, alternative assets are any investments that aren’t correlated with stocks and bonds. Diversification and risk management are key. They include REITs, commodities, MLPs, long-short strategies, managed futures, options, currencies, hard assets and more.