A Beginning Guide to Alternative Assets - There's hills in them thar gold

People invest in traditional assets – stocks, bonds and cash. This is a textbook about other assets –“alternatives”. Most (all?) alternative textbooks seem to only discuss funded alternatives. When discussing real estate, it is usually assumed one buys the building. Totally separate are textbooks in derivatives – buying with little money upfront (unfunded). We believe both funded and unfunded alternatives should be organized on what drives value, not whether you borrow to buy the asset. How to value both types of alternative assets are combined in this book.The authors believe in the spiral method of teaching. This book initially covers all alternative assets with minimal mathematics, suitable for undergraduates and inquisitive investors. A mathematics chapter follows and the material is presented again more rigorously. Appendices are presented illustrating the mathematical concepts. Exercises are also included to stimulate essay answers.

Howard Lodge received his PhD from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. He started as an academic, doing neural modeling of the eye. He went to Wall Street in NYC (primarily Morgan Stanley) and did mathematical modeling of derivatives for 18 years. He was also head of derivatives for several Fortune 500 firms. Joseph Rinaldi received his MBA from Pace University, NYC. He began his career as a mortgage trader and hedging specialist. During the 1990's, he traded over $35 billion of assets (mainly derivatives) for the RTC/FDIC. He then founded a money management & RIA firm and also teaches at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Md.