The Alternative Answer: The Nontraditional Investments That Drive the World's Best-Performing Portfolios

The Alternative Answer by Bob Rice is the first book to explain the new world of alternative investing strategies, showing how to use these new products for inflation-protected income, risk-adjusted growth, and long-term wealth transfer.

The Yale Endowment keeps only 6% of its investments in US stocks, but its portfolio has produced a 100% gain over the past decade. Indeed, the world’s elite investors have long relied on alternative investments to produce their superior returns. Until now those options were the exclusive purview of institutions and the super wealthy, but today any informed investor can play the same game.

A rainbow of investment options such as timber, startups, MLPs, hedged strategies, managed futures, infrastructure, cat bonds, peer-to-peer lending, farmland, and dozens of other non-traditional strategies can provide dramatically better gains, with less total risk, than the standard choices. In The Alternative Answer, Bob Rice, Bloomberg TV’s Alternative Investment Editor, leads an entertaining and easy-to-understand tour of this world, and suggests specific alternative investments for all four key “jobs” of a portfolio: safely generating more current income; decreasing risks of economic shocks; significantly increasing long-term profits; and protecting purchasing power over time.

Regardless of experience or net worth, readers will learn exactly what to do to substantially improve their investment performance—in the same way that the world’s best investors already do. Stocks and bonds alone aren’t nearly enough. Investors need an Alternative Answer, and now they have it.

Bob Rice is Bloomberg TV's Alternative Investments Editor, the managing partner at Tangent Capital, and a board member of investment advisors with more than $2 billion under management. The positions he has held throughout his multifaceted career have spanned many domains: Wall Street law firm partner; public company CEO; trial lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice; and technology entrepreneur.