Alt Wants To Help You Diversify Into Alternative Assets

Enterprise & Cloud Alt Wants To Help You Diversify Into Alternative Assets Gil Press Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about technology, entrepreneurs and innovation. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Oct 31, 2022, 09:56am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin What do Tom Brady, Alex Morgan, and Tobias Harris have in common? And what is the future of asset diversification? The answer to both questions is one word: Alt. As in Alt , the startup that wants to “transform investing by unlocking the value of alternative assets. ” Right now, it is transforming the market for sports cards, having raised over the last two years just over $300 million from VCs, an alternative investment advisory firm (Atalya Capital), angel investors, and professional athletes like the ones mentioned above.

Baseball card production peaked in the late 1980s however, baseball cards are still one of the most . . .

[+] influential collectibles of all time. getty “I always invested in alternative stuff,” says Alt’s founder and CEO Leore Avidar. He counts his other startup , Lob (providing direct mail and address verification APIs) as one of his alternative assets investments and Crunchbase reveals at least 9 other of his many private equity investments.

Avidar also reports investing in crypto since 2014 and starting investing in sports cards in 2016, “when my dad sent me a box of cards. ” This experience with alternative assets led to Avidar’s realization that they are not considered by financial institutions to be secure collaterals for traditional loans. Will he be able to change it by establishing a financial foundation, an infrastructure for alternative assets that will make them more liquid, transparent, marketable? MORE FOR YOU Why The Rock’s Social Media Muscle Made Him Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actor Accused Pelosi Attacker Reportedly Had ‘List’ Of Potential Targets Inflationary Pressure: Should You Adjust Your Retirement Target? Alt tells you how much the card you want to sell or buy is worth, based on recent transactions and other data it aggregates from relevant sources.

When we talked, Avidar showed me a card that was offered for sale on eBay for $250,000 but was worth a mere $37,000 according to Alt’s valuation. View of a vendor’s table filled with baseball cards, yearbooks, and other items during a baseball . .

. [+] card and sports memorabilia show at the Armenian Church (630 2nd Avenue), in the Murray Hill neighborhood, New York, New York, April 12, 1980. (Photo by Walter Leporati/Getty Images) Getty Images Alt also provides a free custody service, protects sellers and buyers from fraud, and charges 1.

5% on transactions. It also allows its customers to ask for loans based on their holdings. But for Avidar, providing a transparent and well-organized marketplace for a $15 billion market is just “a proof of concept.

” The long-term goal is much broader: “If we do it for one asset class, we will be able to do it for a lot more asset classes. We should be good for any type of alternative asset, whether its physical or digital. ” His big aspiration is for Alt to become an exchange for private stock, as “venture-backed private equity needs to be disrupted.

Private equity is all locked up, people are waiting for companies to go public, there is no pre-public liquidity market, no one has tackled it because it is so complex. ” Why not do it now? “The way to build a really big business is to stay focused. Until we are number one in trading cards, we are not moving to anything else,” explains Avidar.

In 2021, fundraising for alternative assets, including private equity, real estate, infrastructure, private debt, and natural resources, surpassed $1. 1 trillion, and total assets under management in alternatives exceeded $9 trillion, according to Moody’s 2022 asset management outlook. In the near future, alternative assets may play a much bigger role in investment portfolios than they do today.

Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, on a recent earnings call, predicted that individual investors would need to sharply increase their allocation to private markets to meet their savings needs. “I could see a day in the not-too-distant future when a client’s portfolio is not 10% or 15% alternatives but is 50% alternatives,” said Rowan. Currently, only about 1% to 2% of the estimated $80 trillion held by individual investors worldwide is allocated to alternative investments, according to PitchBook Data Inc.

But this is changing, as individual investors look to new approaches for dealing with public markets volatility and the simultaneous decline in the value of both stocks and bonds. This shift is already happening in the investment portfolios of public pension funds who are taking more investment risks in order to be able to meet their future obligations. Alternative assets now comprise 24% of public pension fund portfolios, according to the most recent data from the Boston College Center for Retirement Research.

That is up from 8% in 2001. “I have a 10-year time horizon, we are planning on making it really big,” says Avidar. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

Check out my website . Gil Press Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.