Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I made a list of opportunities to consider, using "investment" very loosely to include non-productive assets and even cash. What did I miss? Please give thoughts on any of these.

Cash
CDs
Commercial real estate
Corporate bonds
Cryptocurrencies
Fine art (not sure how feasible it is to get into this)
Forex
Gold (or other precious metals)
Hedge Funds
High-end watches
Micro-lending (eg prosper, lending club)
Private Equity
Rental real estate (ie active management)
Stocks (including REITs)
Tax liens
Treasury bonds
Venture Capital

• Savings bonds (pretty different than treasuries, since there's no secondary market)
• Municipal bonds
• Mutual Funds
• Closed-end funds
• ETFs
• ETNs
• Commodities

"Stocks" is also pretty broad, since it includes things that have different behaviors and tax characteristics: common stock, preferred stock, REITs, BDCs, MLPs

Hedge funds aren't an asset class; they're a legal structure. Saying "hedge fund" tells you nothing about what it does. You can simply hold stocks and nothing else in them if you want, and many do.

Venture capital is a subset of private equity.

Direct lending. Banks and other lenders sell their debt wholesale (this is called, creatively enough, "bank debt".)
Annuities/life insurance (as a primary purchaser)
Annuities/lottery winnings/structured settlements (taking over the cashflows in exchange for a lump-sum payment, as those people who advertise on daytime TV do)
Distressed debt/foreclosure/bankruptcies, very different animal than treasuries/corporates
MBSs, CLOs, CDOs -- all have similar structures
Convertible bonds
Strips; i.e., stripped bonds. You can buy just the coupon payments or just the principal. People do this for the duration/convexity play.
Forward contracts.
Options, haven't mentioned those yet; exchange-traded and OTC.
Swaps
...Swaptions!
Swap spreads. Spread swaps. (OK, only the first thing exists.)
Credit-default swaps.
Arbitrage between physical and derivative instruments, or just in general.
Patents/intellectual property.
Infrastructure (toll roads, airports).
Asset allocation/macro.
High-frequency trading/stat arb.
Volatility and arbitrage thereof.
Viaticals.
Manufactured spending.
Collectibles, generally.
Flipping on eBay? That's arbitrage I guess.
Squatting, both physical and cyber?
Selling your body or fluids therefrom.
Switching phone plans every month. No wait; it's not 1998.
Standing at the offramp of the nearest freeway holding up a sign.
Those extreme couponing people who figure out the store's registers allow things to "sell" for negative prices when certain coupons are stacked.
Theft, embezzlement, fraud, counterfeiting.
Apparently many people do something called "work".

Just about every asset has seen multiple swings between being a great investment and being a horrible investment. Except for extreme couponing that is, as you're now stuck with 80 bottles of PowerAde.

Forex is highly dangerous
MostForex websites are fraud
Actually a kind of gambling
Recommend to refrain from Forex

You may want to add mortgage notes. We are getting consistent yields of 8%-12% on those and principal is 100% secured.

VirtualU wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 03, 2019 8:21 am

You may want to add mortgage notes. We are getting consistent yields of 8%-12% on those and principal is 100% secured.

Yes; I mentioned MBSs / structured products generally unless you're thinking of something else.

Union cards (degrees & diplomas)
Pension & other funds