The following is a guest post by FarmTogether, a leading online marketplace that provides accredited investors with direct access to institutional-grade farmland. FarmTogether is a long-time supporter of Financial Samurai.

The mainstreaming of alternative investments and farmland investing is picking up steam. For example, FarmTogether recently closed on the largest single-asset crowdfunded farmland investment to date: a 201-acre organic redevelopment in Franklin County, Washington (Galaxy Organic Apple Orchard)  – a $22.28M deal.

Meanwhile, on February 8, 2021, Tesla announced that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. Tesla also said it would start accepting the currency as payment. This news helped send the price of Bitcoin up from just under $39,000 to now roughly $58,000 today. Several companies have already jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon and added the cryptocurrency to their balance sheets. More companies may soon follow.  

This is but one example of a wider trend of increasing mainstream acceptance of alternative investments as an essential component of a portfolio. Institutional investors have been increasing their allocation to alternatives in search of diversification and potentially higher returns.

Thanks to a range of technology-enabled platforms, more and more alternative assets are accessible to individual investors as well. Read on to find out why alternative investments are so popular and how you can add them to your portfolio. 

In the never-ending desire to get rich quick, Reddit investors are the new kings and queens of day trading.

Back in college, I was a degenerate day trader who bet on stocks between classes, partially based on what I read on message forums. More than 25 years later, it is fascinating to see forum-based trading explode again, but with much more firepower.

The following is a guest post from FarmTogether, a leading farm investing platform and Financial Samurai sponsor. With FarmTogether, you can diversify your portfolio and increase your passive income in a less volatile manner.

Looking for Robinhood alternatives? You’ve come to the right place as a DIY investor.

Robinhood is an online brokerage house that steals from the poor (retail investors) and gives to the rich (hedge funds). Robinhood doesn’t charge its users a fee. But it sells its order flow to hedge funds and other institutional investors.

When Robinhood decided to arbitrarily shut down the trading of 13 names on January 28, 2021, it caused thousands of investors to lose billions of dollars. As a result, you would be nuts to continue trading on the Robinhood platform. During the next high-volume trading issue, you could get trapped again.

Now that Robinhood went public on July 29, 2021, it will be one of the greatest ironies if the Robinhood platform and other trading platforms had to suspend trading of HOOD stock. Since IPO, Robinhood’s stock has performed poorly.

Features you want from an online brokerage:

• Reliability – You can log in without the website crashing. The online brokerage stays up during trading hours. There are few or no bugs.

• Fairness – You should be able to buy and sell and trade whatever securities you want without artificial interference from the brokerage. In other words, the brokerage won’t randomly shut down the ability to trade certain names out of the blue or lock you out of their platform.

• Real-Time Quotes – In order to trade effectively, you need real-time quotes, not delayed quotes. Securities move too quickly for you to be waiting on a 10 or 15 minute lag.

• Robust Research – The best online brokerage houses will have robust proprietary research and data on various stocks and bonds. The research is important to get an idea of what the street is thinking and to help you make better investment decisions.