StrikeAndYield crib sheet · information and education only

Alternatives & Private Markets

Beyond public markets: private equity, venture, private credit, hedge funds and insurance-linked securities.

The shelf — 16 instruments

Annuity	The only product that pays until you die. You are not buying a return — you are buying insurance against outliving your money, and the price is your capital.
Hedge Fund	Not an asset but a licence: pooled capital free to go long, short, levered and anywhere — strategies as the product.
Open-Ended Property Fund	Daily dealing in buildings that take months to sell — the clearest liquidity mismatch anybody still sells to the public.
P2P & Marketplace Loan	Retail investors funding consumer and business loans through a platform. Real credit risk, real yields, and a business model that has repeatedly discovered it was a lender all along.
Private Equity Fund	Buy whole companies with borrowed money, improve or re-lever them, sell in five years — finance's ownership business.
Venture Capital	Portfolios of long shots: most investments die, one pays for everything — the power law as an asset class.

Infrastructure Funds	Owning the pipes, ports, towers and grids — cash flows measured in decades, contracts measured in inflation clauses.
Prediction Market	A contract paying $1 if an event happens and nothing otherwise, so its price reads as a probability. A forecasting instrument that is also, unavoidably, a wagering one.
Private Credit	The shadow banking success story: funds replaced banks as lenders to the buyout world, and kept growing.
Timberland & Farmland	Assets that grow while you wait. The only investment whose inventory increases in volume when you decline to sell it — and the reason institutions treat them as a category of their own.
Unit-Linked Policy	A fund portfolio inside an insurance wrapper. The investment risk is entirely yours; what you bought from the insurer is a tax treatment and a set of fees.

Catastrophe Bond	Earn double-digit yields for insuring hurricanes — the asset class genuinely uncorrelated with markets.
Life Settlement	Buying someone's life insurance policy, paying its premiums, and collecting when they die. Genuinely uncorrelated, and the asset class where the modelling error has a name and a face.
Litigation Finance	Funding a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the award. Genuinely uncorrelated with markets, entirely correlated with a judge — and priced like a portfolio of binary options.
Royalty Stream	Buying a share of somebody else's revenue, forever or until a patent expires. Top-line exposure with no operating costs — and a valuation that lives or dies on the terminal assumption.
Venture Debt	Lending to companies that lose money, secured on the expectation that someone else will fund them again. Cheaper than equity for the founder, and a bet on the next round for the lender.

Manager selection — It dominates everything else here
The cost and availability of leverage — Most private returns are levered public returns
Exit conditions — A return is not realised until somebody buys
The valuation policy — Smoothness is a reporting choice, not a property
Fee structure — It compounds against the investor exactly as returns compound for them
Lock-ups and liquidity terms — They decide who bears the cost of an exit

Counted from the same table each product page prints. Not a rating and not a ranking: there is deliberately no total.