Books
Kevin Mirabile headshot
Kevin Mirabile
Exotic Alternative Investments:
Standalone Characteristics, Unique Risks and Portfolio Effects
Kevin Mirabile
Clinical Associate Professor of Finance and Business Economics
Did you ever kick yourself for not holding onto the baseball card collection that you loved while growing up? Particularly after hearing that a 1952 Mickey Mantle card recently traded at an auction for $5.2 million?
Exotic Alternative Investments: Standalone Characteristics, Unique Risks and Portfolio Effects cover
Clinical Associate Professor Kevin Mirabile, DPS, head of the Gabelli School’s alternative investment concentration, examines such quirky, offbeat investment opportunities in Exotic Alternative Investments: Standalone Characteristics, Unique Risks and Portfolio Effects (Anthem Press, 2021). The book delves into asset classes like life insurance settlements, litigation funding, farmlands, royalties, weather derivatives, and collectibles.

Three parameters distinguish “exotic investments”: An investor needs to be able to readily trade the asset; there needs to be a publicly available index to compare its value to similar assets; and there needs to be an instrument that allows them to purchase a share. Beanie Babies don’t make the cut, but art, baseball cards, life insurance, tax liens, e-sports teams, cannabis farms, Bitcoin, and shipping containers do.

“I really had a desire to search for new asset classes that fulfill the promise of what alternative investments were supposed to bring.”
“The world’s a changing place,” Mirabile said. “There are a lot of changes in where people live, how they work, how they consume their entertainment, how they store their goods, and what they think is collectible. I really had a desire to search for new asset classes that fulfill the promise of what alternative investments were supposed to bring. These are investments that diversify a portfolio.”
Did you ever kick yourself for not holding onto the baseball card collection that you loved while growing up? Particularly after hearing that a 1952 Mickey Mantle card recently traded at an auction for $5.2 million?

Clinical Associate Professor Kevin Mirabile, DPS, head of the Gabelli School’s alternative investment concentration, examines such quirky, offbeat investment opportunities in Exotic Alternative Investments: Standalone Characteristics, Unique Risks and Portfolio Effects (Anthem Press, 2021). The book delves into asset classes like life insurance settlements, litigation funding, farmlands, royalties, weather derivatives, and collectibles.

Three parameters distinguish “exotic investments”: An investor needs to be able to readily trade the asset; there needs to be a publicly available index to compare its value to similar assets; and there needs to be an instrument that allows them to purchase a share. Beanie Babies don’t make the cut, but art, baseball cards, life insurance, tax liens, e-sports teams, cannabis farms, Bitcoin, and shipping containers do.

“I really had a desire to search for new asset classes that fulfill the promise of what alternative investments were supposed to bring.”
“The world’s a changing place,” Mirabile said. “There are a lot of changes in where people live, how they work, how they consume their entertainment, how they store their goods, and what they think is collectible. I really had a desire to search for new asset classes that fulfill the promise of what alternative investments were supposed to bring. These are investments that diversify a portfolio.”
Exotic Alternative Investments: Standalone Characteristics, Unique Risks and Portfolio Effects cover
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