Alternative assets are investments outside stocks, bonds, and cash, and investors often use them to diversify a portfolio. The tradeoff is that most aren't traded on public exchanges, so prices, performance, and company details are harder to find and verify. That's why data plays a bigger role here than in traditional investing.
In this article, we'll cover the main alternative asset classes, how they differ from traditional investments, and how investors use public web data to evaluate them.
What are alternative assets?
When talking about alternatives, one first has to refer to what’s traditional. In investment, standard asset classes are stocks, bonds, and cash. These traditional investments are publicly traded, for example, via stock exchanges in a stock market. Alternative investments or assets are all tradeable goods that aside from these three types of traditional asset classes, deals with all kinds of goods that one invests in expecting their value to rise over time. Naturally, this makes alternative asset classes very wide-ranging and diverse. Let’s explore them closer.
Types of alternative assets and investors
Alternative assets cover a wide range of investments, from stakes in private companies to physical goods like gold or fine art. Each class works differently. They vary in how investors access them, how long capital stays locked up, and how much reliable information is available before investing. Here are the main types investors consider today.
Private equity
First, there is a large category of alternative investment types, collectively known as private equity. The common feature of the different types of such alternative investments is capital that isn’t listed on a public exchange. What makes private equity a type of alternative investment is the fact that investors usually offer more than just funding for the private company they invest in. Additionally, such investors use their resources to provide various expertise, guidance, and financial advice to the firm’s management and service providers.
The three major types of private equity are venture capital, growth capital, and buyouts.
Venture capital
Venture capital (VC) is the funding provided to start-ups or early-stage firms with high growth potential. VC investors venture into such developing projects in exchange for equity in the company. Thus, venture capitalists assume part of the risk associated with start-up development but also get a degree of control over it.
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Growth capital
Growth capital, also known as expansion capital, is just that – funds for a relatively mature company to expand. Companies come to private equity investors for growth capital when they have already been in business for some time and now see an opportunity to go bigger or restructure for future benefits.
Buyouts
The strategy that PE investment is perhaps most associated with nowadays is leveraged buyout. When applying this strategy investors use mostly borrowed funds to acquire a company, restructure or otherwise raise its value and eventually sell it.
Hedge funds
Hedge funds are alternative investment funds that gather capital from private and institutional investors such as pension funds and mutual funds and invest it in diverse assets for high potential returns. Hedge fund managers employ various investment strategies and techniques, such as market-neutral and long-short equity to achieve the wanted results.
Real estate
Real estate investing, like investments in other types of real assets is considered an alternative investment since real assets have less liquidity than traditional. Three main types of real estate assets are residential, industrial, commercial properties. Investors can generate income by acquiring shares in real estate investment trusts, which invest in commercial properties.
Private debt
This is the type of debt that is not bank loans or open market investments. With private debt, investors profit from repayments of initial loans plus interests.
Natural resources
Alternative investments into such natural resources as gold and other precious metals, oil, gas, and grown products have been around for centuries. Investors access various markets for natural resources through exchange-traded funds or a mutual fund.
Collectible items
Everything, from artwork and wine bottles to baseball cards and comic books, can become alternative investments if we can reasonably expect their value to rise.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is the youngest major alternative asset class, covering digital assets like Bitcoin and stablecoins. Access has widened since January 2024, when the SEC approved exchange-traded products that hold Bitcoin directly, so investors can now buy exposure through a regular brokerage account. Prices are still highly volatile, though, and the short track record makes long-term risk harder to judge.
Traditional investment vs. alternative investment
Traditional and alternative assets differ in how easily they trade, who can buy them, and how much information investors get. Here's how they compare.
Liquidity
Stocks, bonds, and cash can usually be sold within days. Most alternative assets take much longer to sell, and private funds often lock up capital for years.
Types of owners
Alternative assets have long been the domain of institutional and accredited investors. In the U.S., accredited investors include individuals earning over $200,000 a year or with a net worth over $1 million, excluding their primary residence. Retail access has grown through options like publicly traded REITs and exchange-traded products that hold Bitcoin.
Regulation
Publicly traded securities must follow strict registration and disclosure rules. Many alternative investments, such as private funds and private offerings, face lighter disclosure requirements, which leaves investors with less information.
Sensitivity to market conditions
Many alternative assets appear to move independently of public markets. However, private assets are valued through periodic appraisals, which smooth reported returns and can hide their real volatility and correlation with stocks.
Usage of leverage
Both groups use leverage, or borrowed money. Traditional investors can borrow through margin accounts, while strategies like leveraged buyouts rely on borrowing far more heavily.
Risk and returns
Alternative investments add risks like illiquidity, higher fees, and limited disclosure. Higher risk doesn't guarantee higher returns, and results vary widely between managers.
Below is a quick side-by-side summary of traditional vs alternative investments.
Advantages of using public web data for investment
Most alternative assets don't come with the regular disclosures that public companies file, so investors often work with limited information. Public web data helps fill those gaps with signals that update often and can be compared across companies and markets. Here's where it adds the most value for investors.
Variety of information
Even traditional institutional and accredited investors utilize public web data to boost their investment decisions. But having understood the basics of alternative investments it’s not hard to see that public web data is especially necessary here. Public web data is even more diverse than alternative assets, thus it can provide valuable information for all asset classes. From public sentiment data to firmographics, all types of public web data can help to determine the value of private companies or items that alternative investors might want to trade.
Efficient decision-making
In private markets, the biggest obstacle to a fast decision is often missing information. Private companies rarely publish financials, and fund reports and appraisals can arrive months late. Public web data fills that gap with signals that update continuously, such as headcount growth, hiring activity, leadership changes, and funding rounds. These signals help investors judge a company's momentum before official numbers are available and act before competitors do.
Machine learning
According to a 2024 Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority survey, 75% of financial firms already use AI. However, investment models and AI agents are only as reliable as the data behind them. They need fresh, structured records in machine-readable formats like JSONL and Parquet, not batch files updated a few times a year. At Coresignal, we provide 4.5B+ company, employee, and jobs records in real time, with webhooks for change alerts and an MCP Server that connects our data directly to AI tools.
Rare insights
As public web data ranges far beyond traditional financial asset data, it can provide insights that are simply not possible when using just traditional sources. These are the kind of rare insights that most investors dealing with alternative assets look for. Satellite imagery might show activity in the mines where there are precious metals from around the globe, helping to determine the volume of supply and thus market worth of these metals. While social media presence of contemporary artists might have an impact on their public image that translates into acceptance of their art for the following decades. Such examples of insights provided by public web data are valuable although relatively easy to think of, while the ones hidden deeper in the data are even more rewarding.
The importance of data when dealing with alternative assets
Alternative investments are less regulated and cover a wide range of assets and deal structures, so private markets offer much less transparency than traditional ones. When investors commit large sums with only a partial view of the facts, they risk making costly mistakes. Institutional and individual investors alike also face the risk of fraud.
When fraud is suspected after a deal, untangling it can take years, hence the old saying "buyer beware." Art collector Dmitry Rybolovlev's case shows how long and costly these disputes can be. Starting in 2015, he accused art dealer Yves Bouvier of overcharging him by more than $1 billion across 38 artworks, a claim Bouvier denied. The two settled in December 2023 on undisclosed terms. A month later, a U.S. jury rejected Rybolovlev's separate claim that Sotheby's had helped Bouvier, ending nearly a decade of litigation.
The best way to reduce these risks is to expand and diversify sources of relevant information. Traditional data sources say little about the trustworthiness of a broker or service provider, a seller's true asking price, or alternative assets that receive even less attention than fine art.
Publicly available information can help investors build a clearer picture. Company records, team changes, hiring activity, and public posts can reveal inconsistencies before a deal closes. Because it can expose warning signs and counter misinformation, public web data is one of the most practical tools for evaluating alternative assets.
Wrapping up
When doing things in an alternative way, one can no longer rely only on traditional tools. Thus, investors find their path through the broad and dense jungle of alternative investment, by getting directions from public web data sources. Whatever the asset is, there are always public web data types relevant for trading it.
