The Five Most Bizarre Investment Products Out There

The S&P 500 traded flat last year.

Uncertainty in the markets and the rise of high-frequency trading has made it  especially difficult for retail investors to make a decent return.

In times like these, people often turn to stranger alternative investments  to seek above-market returns.

Here are a few strange investments you might not be aware of.

1. Weather Derivatives

When you want to demonstrate to a friend at a cocktail party just how arcane  and even hilarious the world of high finance has become, there’s no better  product to bring up than the weather derivative. A futures contract is a  derivative, and we can understand that there ought to be a market for pork  bellies and lean hogs and the like because these are goods that have intrinsic  value. Weather futures trade on goods that have no intrinsic value—but storms  can certainly mess up a lot of things that do have intrinsic value, and that’s  the point of a weather future.

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