When you shop around for investment advice, you usually end up hearing a lot of the same thing.
All the advice gets a bit boring, a bit conventional. Put your money into your 401k arrangement at work! Find your favourite mutual fund and make your money work for you there! Buy up some real estate while the market is hot!
The result of this, of course, is that the vast majority of investors end up putting their money into pretty much the same things.
Not that I want to disparage people too much for that, of course, these things do tend to be tried and tested pretty thoroughly, and going too far off the beaten track hasn’t been known to make everyone a millionaire.
Then again, neither has staying on the beaten track. The grim fact to face is that most investors don’t do very well at all. In fact, most people who begin investing actually just end up losing money.
So why should we be afraid of looking into more unconventional opportunities? You may have heard of some of these, I imagine. But their praises aren’t always sung by the people who should be singing them. As long as you’re smart about it, you could find some profit in these areas while everyone else chases retirement funds and bank interest.
The other great thing about unconventional investing opportunities? They give you a really good and accessible way of diversifying your portfolio.
Structured notes
A structured note is a type of debt obligation. I know: it sounds like a very unsexy combination of words. A better way to put it is to describe it as a debt security. The return you get can be based on a lot of basic features, such as interest rates and equity indexes.
Essentially, they work a lot like bonds, but you get to set your own terms. They’re typically provided by financial institutions like banks. One thing that puts people off is that they’re particularly vulnerable to market risk. They also don’t have a high liquidity. It’s something you should be expecting to hold for a long time.
Precious metals
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This is a classic, right? Who hasn’t heard of investing in the likes of gold and silver? The problem with this type of financial commitment is that people have been giving it a bad name recently. People think it’s too “obvious” to invest directly in assets like gold.
It’s also not known to provide people with the overnight riches that they assume it will give them. But precious metals investing has a lot of advantages. It’s very easy to sell to a variety of markets. Its value also remains stable, unaffected by inflation rates.
Other people
Have you ever heard of peer-to-peer lending? Basically, it involves a platform on which budding investors bid on individual loans. People looking for a loan will pitch their idea online and investors will get involved via instant bids.
Investors have reported seeing an annual return of 6-16%, as long as they play their cards right. This typically means that you shouldn’t put all your investment money in one loan. You should spread them across several smaller loans.
