The Intelligent Partnership team has been working hard over the last 12 months to produce the second Alternative Investment Report, AiR 2014. Viewed as a complex and difficult to understand, alternative investments often get overlooked in favour of traditional ever increasingly correlated mainstream markets. There is a demand for an alternative – assets that are uncorrelated, provide diversification and strong returns.

The updated version follows up from where we left off in 2013, assessing the impact of the regulator’s interventions over the last 18 months – examining the main factors behind the changing regulatory landscape for alternatives in 2013. Investors must fully understand the risks associated with any investment and alternatives can present a completely different set of risks compared to traditional investments, requiring more time, research and knowledge to fully understand.

This report also includes surveys of advisers, agents, SIPP operators and product providers who participate in the sector to find out various trends like most popular alternative sector and types of due diligence that is undertaken by pension providers and advisers.  In addition to the surveys, the report covers the findings that came out of the Alternative Investment Summit IP organised in November 2013.

The heart of the report is the analysis of the 8 main alternative sectors: energy; collectibles; farmland; forestry; land; precious metals; property; and other more esoteric products like truffles and shipping containers. In the report details of the largest sector, property, some of the more diverse sectors such as energy, a review of the key fundamentals for investing in collectibles and an examination of the sector with the highest returns on offer, forestry can be found. The sector analysis is based upon our investment register which, since 2010, has been built through desktop research and mystery shopping.

The report is due to be published next week and is relevant to anyone who is interested in or advises on alternative investments. The report can be accessed here.