high net-worth individuals, institutional investors, pension funds or private banks, alternative investments are becoming popular offering more diversification to investors’ portfolios. The benefits of such diversification have been demonstrated by Harry Max Markowitz ( 1990, Nobel Prize in Economics ) in the Modern Portfolio Theory. He proved mathematically that an investor can reduce portfolios’ risks simply by holding instruments which are not perfectly correlated – a correlation coefficient not equal to one. By holding a diversified portfolio, investors should be able to reduce their exposure to individual asset risk.
If investors are attracted by alternative investments in their quest of alpha, it is because allocating to alternative investments offers advantages compared with traditional asset classes and diversification to a portfolio — though involving a