There are a number of asset classes beyond the traditional asset classes, which together can be referred to as alternative investments. This includes a wide range of different types of investments, including real estate, private equity, infrastructure, and commodities.

Alternative asset classes tend to be more illiquid than traditional asset classes, so they might be better suited for long-term investors who don't need instant access to their capital. They tend to be slightly more esoteric than traditional assets with a more diverse set of investments within each asset class.

Also, since these investments are not easy for all investors to invest in and they're lower levels of publicly available information on them, they are often more difficult to value. Alternative asset classes have three main potential benefits over traditional assets. They open up opportunities for more skilled investors with better insights to find mispriced securities and to generate higher levels of return.

They can have lower levels of correlation to traditional asset classes, providing good diversification benefits within investment portfolios that contain traditional assets. And finally, some alternative asset classes can provide returns consistently at or above the level of inflation. This is either because they're themselves a driver of inflation in the case of commodities, or their cash flows are inflation linked, which is often the case with infrastructure investing.