Below is an excerpt from an article in the The Australian Business Review section titled Private Investigations: What you need to know about alternative assets.

Discover iPartners CEO Travis Miller's thoughts as he launches his new book "Grow Your Wealth Faster with Alternative Assets" and discusses it with The Australian Business Review. Miller's book offers a complete introduction to unconventional investing, displaying his skill in discovering high-yield alternative assets. Miller has over 17 years of experience in financial markets and manages over $5 billion in funds. This book, which is available this month from Wiley Publishing and major retailers such as Amazon, provides essential information for anyone looking for varied investing alternatives.

Investing doesn’t have to just be about listed, stocks, bonds and term deposits – there are alternative assets that can offer valuable diversity.

But where to start? Stockhead reached out to a leader in the field.

Travis Miller, co-founder and CEO of iPartners is The Alternative Asset guru, an absolute fiend for finding, unearthing and getting in early on unexpected investing.

Miller has worked in financial markets for the past 17 years, most recently as managing director at UBS Investment Bank, and today he manages over $5 billion in funds.

His coup de gras may’ve been by disrupting the industry a bit by creating iPartners, a financial investment platform to make high-yield alternative investments easily accessible to the ordinary punter.

His new book, Grow Your Wealth Faster with Alternative Assets, explores this further and is out this month via Wiley Publishing and available on Amazon et al.

In producing this exclusive walk-through, Travis accepted the Stockhead challenge to explain the what, how and why of the investment path less travelled.

In his own words, then:

Investing in a private market

An alternative asset is any investment outside of listed stocks, bonds, and term deposits. Alternatives can broaden investor’s portfolios, adding greater returns and diversifying risks. There is a wide cross-section of assets that fall into the alternatives classification – they include private credit, private equity, real estate, infrastructure and agriculture.

Alternatives are private market investments, meaning they are not listed on a stock exchange, as a public company might be.

Instead, private market assets are generally held in units in a unit trust, as a segregated investment vehicle which gives investors a pure exposure to the underlying asset and its returns.

While investing in alternatives has always been significant for institutional investors and family offices, improved access in recent years for private investors has significantly broadened the investor base.

Preqin’s Future of Alternatives 2025 survey found 81 per cent of investors said they expected to increase allocations to alternatives.

In fact, Preqin predicts alternative assets under management will experience the fastest growth in the Asia-Pacific region with a compound average growth rate of 25.2 per cent in the five years to 2025.

In recent years, access to alternatives has improved with investment platforms such as iPartners providing wholesale investors with the opportunity to build a portfolio of alternative assets across managed funds and single-asset investment opportunities.

Cut out the volatility in your life

One advantage of alternatives being private market investments is they generally come with a lower level of price volatility when compared to public market investments.

While an exchange-listed investment comes with daily liquidity, it is also subject to the daily price volatility that comes from the exchange.

Public market investments in alternatives do not change in value daily, however, they still have a periodic valuation process to ensure the asset remains appropriately priced.

Successful investments in alternatives are more about getting access to high-quality assets at the right price than they are about timing a market.

This provides investors with the ability to invest consistently into new opportunities that have been sourced, selected, and structured by the team at (for instance) iPartners when they are made available, without having to feel like they need to closely watch the daily price volatility of the general markets.

Diversification

The capacity of alternative investments to provide diversity is one of the key reasons investors are moving to them.

According to CFA Institute research, diversification is the most effective approach to decreasing portfolio risk.

Alternative assets, such as real estate, commodities, private credit, private equity, and hedge funds offer significant diversification and can assist balance across an investment portfolio.

Promising Returns

Even during the pandemic, alternative sectors including real estate and commodities offered potential positive returns.

According to Preqin, the average return on real estate investments in Q1 2021 (in the midst of pandemic lockdowns) was 1.7 per cent, compared to -0.4 per cent for the S&P 500 index. Private equity has also outperformed public markets in recent years.

Investors might potentially increase their profits by diversifying their portfolios with alternative assets.

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