Alternative Investments

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the expanding world of alternative investments and how the private markets and nontraditional asset classes are reshaping global capital markets. We’ll go beyond Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to examine how major asset owners – pension plans, endowments, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds – construct and manage portfolios in practice. This course connects investment theory with practical realities, including liquidity management, risk budgeting policy, constraints, and long-term asset-liability alignment. Finally, you’ll explore how these investments finance entrepreneurship, infrastructure, and innovation, while offering diversification benefits and distinct risk-return profiles, presenting unique risks due to limited liquidity, opacity, and complexity. Once reserved for institutions and the ultra-wealthy, alternatives are now accessible to informed individuals. Through a mix of lectures, practitioner reports, discussions, guest speakers, and case studies, you’ll learn to think critically about how and why professional investors use alternative strategies to achieve long-term objections. You’ll learn to think like allocators, not just investors.