Summary of Investing in Alternatives with Exchange-Traded Funds

In this tutorial, we looked at several alternative asset classes: commodity and currency exchange-traded funds, bear market ETFs, long-short ETFs, and a few others. Alternative investments like these can help provide diversification to a portfolio, whether traditional or not. They can also help reduce risk and improve return at a given level of risk. Alternative investments accomplish this by using asset classes that move differently from stocks and bonds.

They are, of course, rather complicated for the lay investor to understand.