The AP’s Bernard Condon writes a long article on many different investment vehicles available today.
You can leap off a mountainside in extreme skiing, kick and claw to near death in extreme fighting and twist yourself into a pretzel in extreme yoga. Why not turn investing into an adventure sport?
Professional money managers are scouring the world for oddball assets, desperate to find anything that moves to its own beat rather than rising and falling with everything else in the financial markets.
They are putting money into racehorses, stakes in lawsuits, old coins, even the copyrights to old pop songs.
One fund manager bought stock in a beer company called Bralirwa in Rwanda, where tribal rivalry led to a genocide that left 800,000 people dead in 1994.
“Rwanda triggers a lot of bad memories, so people don’t even think of investing there, but there’s huge opportunity,” says Lawrence Speidell of Frontier Market Select Fund, which also owns stock in an Iraqi soft drink bottler and a Palestinian telephone company.
Not an investment I would choose to make, but then my business is not investing in rapidly growing markets, and it is more lack of knowledge and being comfortable with Wine Investment.
In trading jargon, the Rwandan company and some of Speidell’s other exotic holdings are “uncorrelated.” They have a tendency to move to their own rhythm, a sort of Holy Grail in investing.Discover enough of these assets and a money manager might claim to have achieved “alpha,” an ability to beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 or other indexes without taking on more risk.
That is what all investors seek. I favour Wine Investment as it is an asset backed investment, unlike many of the other instruments discussed in this article.
