An alternative investment is something that falls outside typical investments such as stocks or bonds. Alternative investments include real estate, precious metals, collectibles, and there are many more. In this article, I show you alternative investments that have yielded at least 10% per year (historical average) and show you ways to participate in these markets with relative ease.

What Are Alternative Investments

Alternative investments are assets you buy that tend to produce returns over the long-term but that aren’t mainstream financial products like stocks, bonds, or bank-offered savings products.

Therefore, an alternative investment is basically anything else where the price of the asset fluctuates. In this article, I step beyond the typical alternative investments (like precious metals) into the world of Lego, comics, trading cards, art/NFTs, high-end purses, crypto, wine, farmland, and more.

See how to get involved in these markets with relative ease. Tools are provided to help you assess the value of the alternative investment which can help you decide when to buy and sell.

Alternative investments can be really fun, and they are worth exploring, especially when they make money.

What Are the Benefits of Alternative Investments

Alternative investments provide diversification, and their returns are not necessarily correlated with stock returns. If you already have a stock portfolio, you may want to invest in something that doesn’t move the same way.

Some alternative investments can provide regular income, while others can provide profit when sold.

Alternative investments can also align with a passion or hobby you already have…maybe you just haven’t monetized it yet. Just like there are people who love trading stocks or forex, and then make a career out of it, alternative investments can also be turned into a career.

What is the Downside of Alternative Investments?

The value of alternative investments is often more subjective because there typically aren’t thousands of people buying these products every day like there are in stocks. That means an alternative investment may have a range of values (to different people) at a given time. For example, the exact same comic in the same condition may be selling for three different prices on eBay. I don’t view this as a bad thing. You can buy cheaper and have the patience to sell higher. Capture the long-term trend and benefit from pricing discrepancies.

Like normal investments, if you start making gains on these alternative investments, speak with an accountant to see what your income tax options are.

With any investment, there is a risk of loss.

Alternative Investments That Yield at Least 10% per Year, and How to Get Into Them

Here’s a list of alternative investments along with their yearly average return. While crypto assets have had the highest return in recent years, I discuss them at the bottom of the list since most people have already seen these headlines. The main goal of this article is to present some alternative investments you may not have thought of. And if you have thought of them, I wanted to provide resources that make it easier to get involved.

Here are the alternative investments I will be looking at, in order:

• Comics: 17%
• Art: 15%
• NFTs
• Trading Cards: 12%
• Lego: 11%
• Farmland: 11%
• Wine: 11%
• Purses/handbags: 8% to 10%
• Real Estate (Residential, Industrial): 10%
• Crypto: 24%

And some commonly mentioned alternative investments under the average 10% return mark:

• Rare Coins: 7%
• Gold and Precious Metals: 5% – a special mention for performing so poorly with so much attention
• Currencies (Euro, USD, etc.)

Where available, I have provided long-term performance data. In other cases, shorter-term data is used. Shorter-term data is less reliable and could be affected by short-term euphoria or disenchantment. Consider this when making your investment decisions.

Comics as an Alternative Investment: 12% to 17%

Some of these sections below are where your hobbies can become your income.

Not all comics will see a big increase in value. Like vintage wine, discussed below, some are more desired than others, and thus more likely to appreciate in value.

With comic book collecting, the beauty is that we already know what is collectible. The comics with increasing value now are likely to continue increasing in value into the future. If a 50-year-old comic isn’t desired by now, it probably won’t be in the future.

That said, after COVID almost everything increased. That’s nice when things make a big jump in one year, but I am more concerned with the longer-term steady growth.

Desirable comic books—like Amazing Fantasy #15, which was the first appearance of Spider-man—have tripled in value in the last 10 years. Copies rated 7.5/10 are fetching $156,000 in 2021, and were $32,000 in 2011. That’s 17% annualized. The chart, based on auction and eBay sales, shows a nice steady rise.

Track the value of comics on GoCollect. Their charts are used below.

That’s maybe a little pricey for many, but there is always the option for other comics or lower grades.

The first appearance of Blade in The Tomb of Dracula #10 has seen a strong rise lately, even in poor-condition copies. Those rated 5.5/10 were trading near the $200 mark from 2015 into early 2019. In 2021 sales have pushed up into the $1400-$1500 area. That’s 33% annualized. But 2021 has been a crazy year, so let’s ignore the spike and use 2020 as our upside. 2020 puts the price around $650, up from $200 six years earlier. That is nearly a 22% return/year.

I went through at least 60 charts based on first or second appearances from characters I know from the Marvel and DC universe. The trends were similar to the charts above. Typically a steady uptrend, and then often a spike in 2021.

Also, just for curiosity, I wanted to see what the long-term return was on comics that aren’t highly collectible. Fantastic Four #63 is from a popular series, but the comic itself is not highly collected. There are no major first or second appearances. It’s worth about $80 (1-year average auction sale price with 7/10 condition). That is still about a 12% per year increase since 1967 when it came out ($0.12). That’s pretty solid growth even from a comic that isn’t highly collectible.

Fantastic Four #52 on the other hand is the first appearance of Black Panther. A 7/10 has a 1-year average sale price of $2140. That’s about a 20% annualized return since printing.

As a general guide, early appearances (1st and 2nd) of popular characters are a good bet. Older, or rare, and limited supply are also good bets. Also, near-mint copies (9.6 to 9.8) of old comics are so rare that they can sell for 20 or 30 times the price of an 8.0. And a 9.8 can fetch double compared to a 9.6.

All these conditions make for higher returns, even though the initial investment is also higher.

And for more fun, look at what some of the top-performing comics have been in recent years.

Buying and selling comics may not be as hard as you think. Comic book conventions, or comic cons, draw tens of thousands of people in most major cities. A reputable dealer/store owner likely knows many clients who are actively buying and selling rare comics. Buying and selling online is an option, but selling locally may not be too difficult once you connect with a store or dealer.

Art as an Alternative Investment: 15%

I know nothing about art. While I may buy some art because I like it, buying art for profit seems way out of my league…and most people’s.

But art can actually be pretty easy to invest in. Masterworks.io lets the experts do the buying and selling, and you basically fund them for however much you want (there are minimums). You then get a cut of profits when the art is sold.

The company started in May of 2019 and has returned 15.3%, after fees, since (as of Oct. Sept. 2, 2022).

How it works is the company’s art experts buy pieces of art they believe will increase in value. They hold onto the art, typically for a year or more, and then sell it. You receive your returns based on the funds invested and the return they get (less fees).

You’ll likely learn about art as you are doing this. You decide which art piece you want to invest in, so you can see how that piece of art does over time.

There is also a secondary market (only open to US investors) where you can buy and sell your shares when you wish (assuming someone pays the price you want).

From my research, which is based on other people’s research, contemporary art tends to have the best return, averaging about 14% per year. The S&P 500 averages about 10%.

If you need to look up what contemporary art is, like I did, it means art produced after the 1950s/1960s (the exact cut-off seems to be in some debate).

NFTs as an Alternative Investment: % unknown

The above is for PHYSICAL art, but what about DIGITAL art? NFTs (nonfungible tokens) are digital pieces of art that can be bought and sold from artists or on an NFT marketplace like OpenSea. The digital art market is relatively new and based on blockchain technology. The Resources section on OpenSea discusses how it all works and how to get started. You are on your own in deciding what to buy and sell. The returns are up to you as well.

But before jumping in, be aware that since the market is new there is lots of hype. Where there is hype there is often misinformation. Kimberly Parker on Medium highlights that most NFTs only sell once, so if you want to sell it for a profit you better hope you were first to see it and others are lining up to buy it from you (not likely). Also, most NFT prices are pretty low—under $100—so don’t expect to make big dollar amounts. Although if you buy and sell lots, the returns could add up.

No rate of return is posted for this section because it could vary significantly from person to person, and there is no major index to track how the sector does as a whole (if you know of one, let me know). Yet it is relevant to the art discussion.

Trading Cards as an Alternative Investment: 12%

Overall, professionally graded trading cards returned 1346% since 2008, based on a trading card index compiled by PWCC (the index is listed on that page, providing a good baseline for collecting cards). The S&P 500 returned a little over 200% over the same timeframe. Even before the surge in card prices in 2021, the card index was beating stock returns handily.

In my own interpretation of this, I excluded late 2020 and beyond. So between 2008 and 2020, the trading card index was up 284% versus 157% for the S&P 500. That’s almost 12% per year for trading cards, not including the surge. Thankfully surges are part of investing, like in 2015 and 2016, as well. So including some of that surge, returns are higher.

If including the surge, prices are up about 21% per year since 2008. Although I do believe many of these COVID spikes will see at least partial pullbacks, so more conservative estimates are fine.

A Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card (Upper Deck, Mint) has had an 800% return over the last 4 years…much of that came in the wake of Covid.

PSCcard.com is where you get current estimated prices on trading cards.

A Wayne Gretzky rookie card made headlines in early 2021 after fetching $3.75 million at auction when it had sold for $465,000 five years earlier (and was sold a few times in between with increasing numbers). That’s about 7x money in 5 years.

You can find lots of examples of this with cards that were already collectible years ago. Sports legends basically.

Rookie cards are always desirable, and the condition will affect the price which means there is a market for everyone looking to spend a couple hundred or less, up to tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, certain editions of things are worth more than others. There are 138 different Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards. A handful are worth something; the rest are worth a few dollars/not highly collected.

As discussed with comics, stick with cards that already have collector’s interests.

Like any market, there are ups and downs, and some years are better than others for price increases and for buying when interest is low.

And if you want to own just a piece of some iconic cards, then check out Collectable. Here, you can own a fraction of high-priced cards that the experts at Collectable have purchased and believe will increase in value. Share in the profits when it is sold. This may only be available to US residents, as I can’t access it in Canada.

Lego as an Alternative Investment: 11%

Between 1987 and 2015 lego sets on average increased by about 11% per year. That’s better than the S&P 500.

Every Lego set is only produced and sold for a limited time. This limits the supply and there is no chance of getting that exact same set again in the future. Some sets may start appreciating right after the set’s production ends but usually it takes some time for people to regret missing out and for the price to go up substantially…usually years.

The best returns are on NIB (new in the box) sets. I love Lego and enjoy building with it, but if you are doing this for an investment, then it’s better to keep it in the box.

Experts also recommend just buying sets as they come out directly from Lego or the Lego Store. You don’t need to go out and buy some fancy set from the past to make money. Buy sets you think will be desirable (some hints below) in the future and hold onto them.

If you do want to delve into buying from other people, or you want to track the value of Lego, BrickEconomy shows prices and returns for thousands of Lego sets.

While most Lego sets appreciate, you can expect much higher returns in historically desirable sets.

In recent years, Super Mario, Stranger Things, Lord of the Rings, and SpongeBob have been top return getters. FORMA, at the top of the list, is the mechanical lego which often involves moving parts and is designed mainly for adults.

For long-term performance, the architecture pieces seem to have solid returns with the odd one making huge returns.

If you are interested in the sets that returned big percentages in recent years, this site shows the top 10 Lego sets for investment in recent years, which have averaged 24% to 49% per year increases.

Farmland as an Alternative Investment: 11%

Before you say “I don’t want no stinking farmland” hear me out. You can actually buy your own farmland, or you can own a piece of it from your couch and collect the monetary benefits.

No matter how you do it —and I will show the easy way—farmland is one of the best performing types of real estate. According to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries, the 25-year average return on commercial and residential real estate is 10.3%, while farmland is 11.2% (as of May 2021). Those are averages and returns will vary by region and individual property. But farmland has done better, overall, in the last 25 years.

Obviously, you could go out and buy farmland, but that seems like a lot of work, and putting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into a property may not be prudent for everyone. So here are some ways to invest in farmland with less capital, without an agent, and from your couch.

• AcreTrader.com lists pieces of farmland that investors can partially own by choosing their investment amount. Income and gains (if the property is sold) are then split between the owners. Land sold on the site has already been reviewed and vetted by the staff, so there is some expert advice already built in.
  
  
• FarmTogether is a similar site.
  
  
• HarvestReturns is another option.
  
  
• FarmFundr
  
  
• Farmland LP focuses on sustainable farming.
  
  
• GoSteward is a little different. You loan money to farmers that need it and receive interest. The current rate is 4.5%.
  
  
• You could also buy a REIT (real estate investment trust), which trades just like a stock. The trust owns farmland, and by buying the REIT, you own a piece of it too. The two major farmland companies have NOT performed great though.
  
  • Gladstone Land Corporation (Nasdaq: LAND)
    
    
  • Farmland Partners (NYSE: FPI)
    

Currently, I don’t like the REIT options for farmland. If going the REIT route, there are way better (and more) options for industrial and residential real estate. Those options are discussed a couple of sections down.

Investment Grade (IG) Wines as an Alternative Investment: 11%

According to VinFolio, an index composed “of the foremost traded IG wines reveals a compounded Annual Growth Rate of 11% from 1988 to 2020.” The site also provides some information on wine investing.

An S&P article tends to agree, showing better returns than stocks, but with less volatility.

If you enjoy wine and maybe would enjoy this as a hobby, then it is worth it. If you are not a wine drinker already, there are some costs involved as wine needs to be stored properly, with special attention to temperature and humidity. If you are not set up for this, it could mean having to renovate a room in your basement or paying for storage. That will cut into profits unless you are equipped already.

High-end Handbags and Purses as an Alternative Investment: 8% to 10%

Limited-supply high-end handbags are sought-after items. These bags typically increase in price by about 8% to 10% per year, and of course, there are the few that rise much more than that.

Specificity matters. Only a select few handbags are likely to increase in value. Most used handbags you can’t give away.

But a crocodile Himalayan Birkin bag by Hermès, now you got the most sought-after bag in the world. Crocodile skin bags by Hermès have rallied about 93% over the last decade. Hermès Kelly bags, about 129%, and Chanel flag bags, about 132%. Figures according to Forbes, as of mid-2020.

I had to do some digging into this one, because I noticed right away that Chanel simply ups their retail price every year. I wanted to know: if someone buys at these ever-inflating retail prices, can they still sell the item in the used market at a higher price down the road?

Let’s start with the retail price increases of the Chanel Jumbo Classic Flap. Chart from Yoogi’s Closet. Prices tend to increase about 8% per year. The price was up to $8,500 in 2021, so a bit of acceleration in the last year. The long-term average is lower, about 5%. But in recent decades the price increases have tended to be bigger, closing in on 9% per year, on average.

Next, Vestiaire Collective is a high-end clothing reseller. They verify the authenticity and give bags a condition rating which will obviously affect value. Used Chanel Jumbo Classic bags in very good condition are selling for $8,400 to $8,600, roughly in line with retail prices as of October 2021. According to a number of sources, this is likely due to limited supply during COVID.

I found some bags from the 1980’s currently selling for $6,000+ in good condition (not very good or excellent), so older bags do tend to increase as well.

More typically, with Chanel and Hermes bags, in very good condition, resale prices will be about 10% to 15% below current retail. This means you typically need to wait a few years for the price of the very gently used bag to get up the price paid for it. After that, it’s all profit. The gently used bag will get dragged along slightly below retail prices.

Why does this happen? Because if you want one of these hard-to-get bags, but can’t afford $8,000, maybe you buy a much older one, or one with a scuff for $5,000 or $4,000…if you are lucky. Or, since they are extremely hard to get by buying them off the shelf (limited supply), instead of paying $8,500 for a new one you can’t find, you buy a used one for $7,500 and save yourself a bit of money.

Now let’s discuss Hermès. TheRealReal sells used Hermès handbags. They have the data on how used Hermes bags are priced relative to the retail price.

Hermès Birkin bags have an average resale value of 80%. If prices rise 10% per year, it will take at least four years to be able to sell at a 20% or more profit.

Hermès Kelly bags have an average resale value of 92%. If prices rise 10% per year, it will take about three years to be able to sell at a 20% or more profit.

Hermès Constance bags have an average resale value of 105%. If prices rise 10% per year, it will take about three years to be able to sell at a 35% or more profit.

But there is a hidden blemish in there. This data is based on what people sold their items for relative to what they paid. This means, on average, most people lost 8% to 20% of their purchase price, and some made 5%. Then again, most of these sales are NOT from “investors”, just people selling their bags. So if you are investing in these bags, hopefully you’ll make more than 5%. But who knows?

Hermes and Chanel were ranked fourth and fifth on TheRealReal’s 2021 resale report. The Louis Vuitton Eva Pochette bag had the highest resale in 2020 and Hermes Birkin hit 210% of retail due to COVID, outpacing the longer-term resale value of 80% discussed above.

Refinery29 has some additional tips on investing in this space.

As a find word, many of the articles written in late 2020 and 2021 talked about 10% average yearly returns, mainly due to the spike in prices during this time period. When I run numbers on things, over 20 and 30 year periods, the return was closer to 8% per year. Still solid.

Industrial and Residential Real-Estate as an Alternative Investment

I already discussed return numbers on real estate in the farmland section. Here’s the refresher: According to the NCREIF the 25-year average return on commercial and residential real estate is 10.3%, while farmland is 11.2% (as of May 2021). I trust these numbers are accurate, so that is why this section is at the bottom; according to those numbers residential real estate returns are about 10% over the last 25 years.

If you go back longer, returns are lower. Going back to 1931, US housing prices have averaged 0.88% over inflation, which puts returns near 3.13% yearly. This is based on the Case Shiller Home Price Index (inflation-adjusted). For much of even somewhat recent history, houses were not viewed as an “investment”. They were a place to live, and if you bought one you didn’t need to pay rent when you were older. Real estate as an investment for the average person is a relatively new phenomenon.

The numbers below are based on a shorter period of 15 years, and I am only looking at REITs, not actual real estate sales.

REITs, or Real Estate Investment Trusts, are a way to invest in the real estate market by simply buying a fund that owns the real estate. You then get income and returns based on how the real estate performs within the fund. REITs can be bought and sold on stock exchanges, like stocks.

To see how REITs have performed, I created indexes on StockRover that include all Residential and Industrial REITs.

As with the other alternative investments, I leave it up to you to decide whether it is a good time to buy based on your own time horizon.

Average Residential REIT Returns:

The starting value of the index was 100 at the start of 2007. The Index value is currently 326.64 (Sept. 2, 2022). That is an 7.68% annualized return. This is the chart below.

Adjusted for dividends, which make up huge component of REIT investing, the index is 469.22, a 10.4% return annualized.

This is over 16 years. Not quite as long as the 25-year stats discussed above, but I was interested to see how REITs have performed. With dividends included, the 10% year figure is solid performance.

Some individual REITs would have performed better, and some would have performed worse. But it provides a good idea of the returns if holding an average residential REIT over this period.

In any index there is always “survivorship bias”; REITs that didn’t make it are not included in the index which is only based on REITs that still exist.

Average Industrial REIT Returns

The starting value of the index was 100 at the start of 2007. The Index value is currently 407.19 (Sept. 2, 2022). That is a 9.17% return annualized. Adjusted for dividends, the index is 680.81, a 12.74% return annualized. This is over 16 years. Not quite as long as the 25-year stats discussed above.

Buying real estate, or buying a REIT are two ways to get involved in this market. But there are also some others:

• Platforms like FundRise also allow individuals to pick real estate projects and invest in them. The investor then gets their share of the profits. RealtyMogul is similar.
  
  
• Groundfloor allows investors to provide short-term loans to house flippers. The average interest earned is around 10%.

Cryptocurrencies as an Alternative Investment: 24%+

Cryptocurrencies are a new market. There are now hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Some have increased thousands of percent, and others have not.

To get a sense of the whole market, the S&P 500 Cryptocurrency Broad Digital Market Index tracks many cryptocurrencies and has averaged 24.92% per year returns over the last five years (annualized), as of Sept. 2, 2022.

As with the other investments discussed, there are always pockets of the market that perform better.

Here is a snapshot showing the top performing crypto assets over the last year (as of Sept 2, 2022), from CryptoWat.ch.

But a lot of coins also tank. More than 600 coins lost more than 90% of their value in the last year.

Coinbase is a crypto exchange that recently went public on the Nasdaq under the symbol COIN. They have a tutorial section under the Learn heading, if you want to know more about crypto and how to get involved.

Popular Alternative Investments With a Less Than 10% Yield

In this section, you’ll find some common alternative investments with lower returns. These include gold/precious metals and rare coins.

Rare Coins as an Alternative Investment: 7%

I looked at two coin indexes.

The PCGS3000 goes back to 1970 and is based on the top 3,000 rare/highly collectible coins from around the globe.

The index value started at 1,000 in 1970 and the most recent value was 70,719 (Sept 2022). Overall, that is an 8.53% return if someone held these coins the entire time. The index is at about 1/3 of its peak. I will let you make your own decision if this is a good long-term spot to buy.

Since 2000 prices have moved up and down, basically ending in the same spot.

The Rare Coin Index, shown below, tracks the movement of 100 US collectible coins. It shows a steady uptrend since 2000. The chart is updated monthly on RareCoins101.

Since 1990 the Rare Coins Value Index increased from 100 to 750, which is 6.35% (annualized) per year.

Gold and Precious Metals as Alternative Investments: 5%

I have seen the 8% to 10% return/year figures for gold passed around online, but that is typically related to a specific time period. Over the longer-term returns are much lower, more toward 5%. I include it only because gold is probably the most talked-about alternative investment, but the hype has failed to produce good returns much of the time.

Gold is an investment most people are familiar with. But there are other interesting precious metals as well, including silver, platinum, and palladium.

The chart below shows how precious metals have performed from 2002 to late 2021, versus the S&P 500 (red and green candles).
GC=Gold
PL=Platinum
SL=Silver
PA=Palladium

Charts provided by TradingView.

Between 2008 and 2021, precious metals, with the exception of Palladium, have underperformed stocks significantly.

The further back you go, the worse it looks for gold and precious metals. See chart below.

Going back to 1980, precious metals have been absolutely crushed by stocks. Silver was spiking in 1980, so silver prices today are well under what they were 40+ years ago. Note: on the chart below, PL and PA don’t commence trading until 1985.

Palladium is really the only precious metal that has been worth owning over the last few decades. I don’t know if that will change, but over the last 40 years, it has spent much of that time outperforming the others.

Here is the chart since 1970 (only gold, silver, and S&P 500 included this time). For reference, according to this S&P 500 Return Calculator, the annualized dividend-re-invested average return over this time period was 11% for the S&P 500.

Gold and silver far under-performed that, which is why I say the average return of a long holding period is more likely 5% per year (gold 4.66% since 1970, and silver 5.3%)

If you are interested in precious metals, bullion bars are always an option. The cheapest generic bars are not the best choice. They can be hard to sell. Make sure the details of the bullion are on the bar. From ConsumerAffairs: focus on the Canadian Maple Leaf and the American Eagle or American Buffalo gold bullion/coins. These are typically the easiest to sell if you need to.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are another way to invest in this market. They are purchased on the stock exchange like shares of a stock, and can be bought and sold with the same ease.

• SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) is a trust that holds gold that you can own a part of. They charge 0.4% per year which reduces the share price.
• iShares Silver Trust (SLV) is the same model with a 0.5% yearly fee.
• Aberdeen Standard Physical Palladium Shares ETF (PALL) has the same model and a 0.6% yearly fee.
• Aberdeen Standard Physical Platinum Shares ETF (PPLT)has the same model and a 0.6% yearly fee.

Currencies as an Alternative Investment

As a currency trader, I love currencies like the Canadian dollar, US dollar, Euro, British pound, and so on. They are an alternative investment, but I wouldn’t recommend just holding currencies for the long term in order to profit.

Currencies are always moving in relation to each other, which means they are “tethered”. They move up and down over long periods of time. That said, they can trend for many years in the same direction. So if interested in currencies, consider taking trades that last up to a few years. But not much longer than that (typically).

If you are unsure how to trade currencies, or how this market operates, the Forex Introduction Course has you covered.

Below is a chart of the US dollar index. It shows the movement of the USD versus a basket of currencies. Over the long term, it oscillates.

Charts provided by TradingView.

This chart is also showing other currencies and how they traded against the USD. When the USD is dropping, other currencies (the basket) are rising, and when the USD is rising, they are falling relative to the USD. Therefore, most major currencies have this tendency. They are stable, which is a good thing for commerce/international trade, but over very long periods of time they are mostly moving back and forth.

So if you decide to invest in currencies like the US dollar, British pound, Canadian dollar, Euro, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, Australian dollar, New Zealand dollar—or you bought some of the currency ETFs to diversify your portfolio (FXC, FXE, FXY, FXB, etc.) —you should look at it as a medium-term trade at most.

Have an exit plan in place, because over a long enough time frame most currencies just range and/or long-term performance/returns will be minimal. Unless you time it perfectly, most major currencies don’t move a lot, so I wouldn’t consider these as a viable alternative investment.

If you are going to invest in currencies, understand interest rates and the carry trade. The interest rate differential between two currencies can have a significant impact on your return.

For shorter-term trading and day trading, currencies are a relatively simple market to get into for that.

Final Word on Alternative Investments

Alternative investments aren’t just about the money. They can be fun! Make them into a hobby, learn a lot about them, and enjoy the process.

This was a load of information to compile, and hopefully, you found it useful. If you did, please share this resource on Twitter, Facebook, or any of your other social platforms.

Remember that past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance.

Returns can vary drastically, especially depending on where you buy and sell, and what you’re investing in.

When I am trading, I like to buy stocks that are already well-liked. They tend to go up with much less guesswork. They are already socially approved. Same thing with alternative investments. Focus on investments people already like and that show steady price increases.

FAQ: What’s your favorite alternative investment?

Comics, Lego, and trading cards. These are fun ones. They offer great returns, and even if it takes a while to make some money, the process is enjoyable. Some exposure to cryptocurrencies is good and I also like to own some real estate.

By Cory Mitchell

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article is personal investment advice, or advice to buy or sell anything. Trading is risky and can result in substantial losses, even more than deposited if using leverage.