15 Uncommon Investments That Actually Make a Lot of Money

You know, there is a lot of money in a lot of weird places. And most people don't realize just how high the returns are if you look outside of savings accounts and real estate. But by the end of this video, you'll have a full list of options that are outperforming traditional investments. Here are 15 uncommon investments that actually make a lot of money. Welcome to ALUX, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired.

First up, ETF targeting weird niches. Not sure how many of you remember the obesity ETF from a couple of years back. It's been liquidated since then, but basically it was a bundle of all of the companies that would profit from the US population getting fat. Ironically, the ticker was slim and it did really well. Turns out there is a bunch of these ETFs designed to make you money based on niche interests. Here are just a couple of examples. UFO ETF. It's actually called the Procure Space ETF. Basically invests in everything related to space exploration and monetizing space in general. If you remember the recent GameStop fiasco, well, there's a meme ETF now called Roundhill Meme ETF that basically bundles together all of the companies that folks on Wallstreetbets are gambling on.

Advisorshares Vice ETF ticker vice bundles all the companies that are bad for the consumers' health but good for their wallet. Think tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and maybe some chocolate. And lastly, before we move on to the next one. If you're a boomer, you probably know who Jim Cramer is. He's an old guy on TV picking stocks and giving investment advice. Now he's been publicly wrong so many times in his predictions that the Internet almost turned him into a meme. And now there is actually something called the inverse Cramer ETF, where basically every time Cramer recommends the sale of a stock, you buy more of it and reverse itself, whatever.

Automation is a bigger deal than you think. And before you picture robots walking down the street, think more in the realm of vending machines. Self-service car washes are a great example. They're a fraction of the cost of those big automated car washes and require little upkeep, especially by comparison. They only cost $25,000 to $35,000 in equipment without taking into account land ownership or lease payments. The average monthly revenue per bay is $1,489. Break even on those is under three years considering all the costs.

Self-storage is another big one. You just need space and to pay for security in the space. Same thing for laundromats, RV rentals, self-service printing. Be it a mall kiosk or online. Basically upload your photos to a cloud drive and pay to have it printed and shipped. There's a lot of value in having pictures in physical form. Self-service is slowly taking over because the left insisted on raising the minimum wage for unskilled workers. Starbucks began installing self-serve kiosks in Chinese supermarkets, where you shop around for groceries, and when you're ready to check out, your coffee is waiting for you.

By land 30 minutes away and wait for 20 years. People try to make real estate investing complicated, but if you have some money and time, it can be the simplest way to get rich. Basically, every city has a main road, a city center, if you will. From that city center, drive straight for about 30 minutes and then stop by the land around you and wait for 20 years. That's it. It's just a matter of time before the city expands and eventually businesses will be looking for land. That's when you sell at a 10 to 20x markup for what you paid.

Right now, agricultural land is dirt cheap. If you've got some time on your hands and it seems like the city is expanding by the nearest agricultural land available to that city and wait it out, buying other people's debt or tax liens. You know, when people borrow money for something and they set their car or house up as collateral, well, that debt is traded on secondary markets, meaning financial institutions sell the debt from one to another. Banks and other institutions may not want to waste time and resources dealing with hard-to-collect-from debtors. So they sell the debt at a discount because some money is better than no money. You can buy the debt someone has and be the one to collect a payment and the interest on that debt.

You could also buy the debt, and if they fail their payment, well, you can legally collect their collateral. In some cases, you could even buy your own debt for $0.50 on the dollar if they fail to collect for a long time. Executive coaches. Coaching works. Great coaching works extremely well. It provides clarity and accelerates progress. A good executive coach is a mentor that not only can save you millions of dollars in mistakes, but can help you to get to where you're going in half the time. This is why the best executive coaches cost over $100,000 per year, plus a commission on the value added.

This is not like therapy, where you just ask questions, but more like a second opinion with a lot of expertise behind it. Your business life changes once you get a mentor that keeps you focused and clears a path forward. We know it's expensive, but the most valuable things in life are… well, it was expensive until we came around and launched the Alexa app. We pay the coaches on your behalf and you get the same level of expertise as top CEOs in Silicon Valley. Go to alux.com/app right now and get over $1 million worth of value for only $99 because look, the app pays for itself before the end of the first month.

Parking spots. Parking is an in-demand commodity. There is little differentiation. Tech has caught up to the point where the parking lot can be fully self-serve and it just prints cash. As long as there is a reason for people to drive up to your location, you are winning. Parking lots are out, cash-flowing commercial property with a tenth of the cost. Instead of running a business, you just have space and an electric barrier that prints tickets and charges people. There's even a surge mechanism to the cost of parking during peak events. We love parking lots as a business, not only because it's cash flow positive with little outside investment, but since location is the primary value add every year. The value of the land goes up 10 to 20 years of profits and then, hey, you sell big to a commercial developer.

Trading natural gas and energy. Energy traders earn a ballpark of $200,000 per year on the low end and around $1,000,000 a year. If you're doing good enough of a job to qualify for bonuses. And that's salary, meaning this is how much companies pay their employees to keep trading. There are many ways to trade natural gas and energy. You can do it digitally like you've been trading stocks, basically the trade of a financial product. You can buy sell futures says if you're more advanced, you can actually buy the physical product, store it and resell for profit.

There's the logistics behind the transport or processing of crude oil from production to end consumer. There are companies that own the pipelines that transport the oil and gas underneath the earth from point A to point B. You pay those companies a lease to be allowed to use their network of pipes. It's by far one of the most profitable industries to trade in. And most people don't even realize it. Early stage startup investing or straight up buying digital businesses in the U.S. If you're an accredited investor, meaning you have a net worth of over $1 million or take-home salary higher than $200,000 a year, you can invest in early stage companies writing a $25,000 to $50,000 investment in a small company that has a lot of potential could prove to be one of the best investments of your life.

That's what venture capital firms do. We find interesting companies, make 10 to 20 investments, and then use the networks you've garnered to offer those companies a chance at hitting it big. Four out of ten usually fail completely. Three will break even-ish. Two are profitable. And if you're really good, one of them will knock it out of the park and pays for everything else. There are plenty of platforms that allow you to become an angel investor or angel list in the U.S., founded by Naval Ravikant, but also Seedblink in Europe, founded by Radu George Askew. If you don't like the idea of being a portfolio investor, well, you could straight up purchase a viable business.

A friend of Deluxe and a serial entrepreneur, Andrew Starkey, is the founder of Acquire dot Com, a platform where people list their businesses for sale from $10,000 all the way to tens of millions. Music catalogs. Now, you might not realize this, but music is an incredible asset class. A great song will earn royalties for years and years. But since you're not an artist, how can you own music? Well, most people think artists are the owners of their own songs, but that's not true. It's the label that owns the masters most of the time.

Basically, the rights to a song and the artist, if they're lucky or had smart lawyers, only gets a fraction of the money coming in. This is why music labels are almost always richer than artists and why usually there's no way for you, an outsider or small investor, to get your hands on anything of value. But that's changing with technology. A bunch of these platforms popped up, allowing artists to upload their masters for their songs and sell fractional ownership of the song. So when it gets played on the radio, on YouTube, in a mall, the song earns the owner of the masters money. That money is then distributed to investors. Song Best Royal Dot IO S.A., Mo Master Exchange, Global Rock Star. These are just a couple.

The industry isn't yet dominated by one platform, but it's just a matter of time until one or two of them separate themselves from the crowd. Being a fractional owner and the success of an artist, football club, a creator, or a streamer are just some of the things that we expect to become more frequent in the years to come. And on a similar note, art. The paintings you don't understand on the walls of really rich people are actually a phenomenal asset class. You may not realize it, but good art is outperforming most traditional investments while serving as a diversification mechanism for the rich. Why? Well, because it's uncorrelated. If there is an energy crisis, art keeps going up. For years, art has been recession-proof and a way to store value through time.

And let's be honest, you're going to have to have a lot of money if you ever want to retire. Bloomberg reports now believe that you're going to need $5 million to retire at all. Even millionaires believe they'll outlive their retirement savings. Remember when they said the economy was getting better? It isn't. Interest rates are killing economic growth. Killing your paycheck. Killing your chances is at retirement. And who wants to die at work? Not us. But here's the good news. Financial security doesn't have to be out of reach.

There's two routes to success for the everyday investor. You can invest early or you can invest wisely. And for over a year now, we've been talking to you about a company that lets you do both. Our long-time sponsors, Masterworks. Masterworks is one of the only companies out there giving you real results by giving you access to the blue-chip art market. We are talking about access to the hottest names in art like Basquiat, cars, and Picasso. Their Ivy League data geniuses and financial experts have delivered positive net returns to their investors every single time, totaling over $45 million in returns to their investors. Investors just like you. No wonder over 800,000 people have joined the platform.

So far. And because ALUX has been a long-term sponsor, our subscribers can still skip the waiting list and start investing today by clicking that link in the description. In supercar collecting, actually the activity of collecting ultra-luxury items has been quite profitable as a whole, from luxury watches to arms bags to pens to whatever. But out of all of these supercars, definitely take the win. The average car loses its value gradually and consistently year over year, making them a liability in the end. Supercars, on the other hand, have collectors' appeal big time.

First of all, they're made in a limited run. They're really expensive and as close to works of mechanical art as it gets with the way the industry is transitioning to electric cars. The current petrol-fueled supercars will feel like the old mobiles of the past and their value will keep going up. Porsches are a great entry point. The value holds over time with many old Porsche models like the 911 Targa selling for over $1 million today, way higher than they did when they were brand new, even adjusted for inflation. And although Lamborghini sells more cars per year, Ferraris have been proven to be a more profitable long-term investment. Then you get into the Bugattis, Pagani, and other limited edition pieces.

Whiskey and fine wine. Fractional investing is here to stay. And we believe that most industries that rely on the appreciation of an asset class will eventually be democratized, like blue-chip art, whiskey, and wine. We'll see an uptick in investments because most people have no idea that whiskey’s performance is almost three times that of gold. That wine has been consistently ahead of the S&P 500. There is the Vino Best Whiskey Investor Act. There are plenty of platforms available now that allow retail investors such as yourself to participate in these markets without the need to physically hold the goods they buy, hold, and resell on your behalf. You just finance the deal. Who knew there was this much money in alcohol?

Rare coins and strange collectibles. Those stamps and rare coins are something our generation probably doesn't care much about. We don't even know where you would buy stamps these days. Do they sell them online? But there is a market for collectors; the stranger and more niche it is, the more obsessed people are with it. Going from broad collections like comic books and magic, the gathering cards to sneakers to unopened coke bottles. We're not even kidding. Okay. These sell for $5,000 a pop. Do you know that was a dad joke? But hit the like button if it still made you giggle. Okay. Old Pez dispensers from the seventies. Those guys are selling for over two grand, and people buy and sell them in bulk. There are forums online of people buying trading cards by the pallet, putting them in storage untouched to resell in 3 to 5 years for 2 to 3 times the money they spent.

Honestly, we got to be real with you. Unless your world revolves around a niche community, though, we wouldn't exactly advise going into something like this because of the limited demand and how prone to hype these can be. And lefties always kind of gave us Beanie Baby vibes and now both markets are worthless. Old patents and copyrights. Did you know you could buy old copyrights, books, logos, anything commercially creative and relaunch it as your own? Here's a crazy story for you. The fidget spinner was invented in 1997 by a woman named Katherine. She had an idea because she wanted to be able to play with her daughter, who was struggling with autism. She patented the design and even pitched it to Hasbro, but they passed in 2005.

The patent expired because Hettinger couldn't afford to renew it since it cost $400 a year. 15 years later, people find it and it becomes the biggest toy on the planet. Everybody's selling it. And Hettinger didn't get a dime and is actually struggling financially, by the way. Even Hasbro is selling fidget spinners since it was no longer a protected patent. If you've been an ALUX for a while, you know about Dale Carnegie. His book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Well, since the book was originally published in 1936, the contents of that book actually fall under the public domain, despite the family's efforts to copyright variations of the book.

This is why you see different book publishers printing their own version with a variety of covers. They're just using public domain IP to cash in. And there are a bunch of these stories around. If you hit subscribe and are interested, maybe we'll do an entire video on crazy copyright stories. But let's get back to our uncommon investments that have incredible returns. That's what we're talking about here today. And we're at number 15 here. Unique holiday rentals. Now, what if I told you there is a potato Airbnb in Idaho that rents for $1,000 for three nights, earning its owner around $100,000 per year? Or a boot home in New Zealand doing similar numbers. People pay for that novelty factor. Cave homes rent for $1,500 a night. Literal castles for $2,000 a night.

You know there's actually an OMG tab where you can sort based on crazy weird homes. Since our generation is so hungry for experiences, they don't mind paying a little bit extra to have a great story to tell once you get back home. Now looking at all of these unusual investments. Which of them do you think makes the most sense long term? Let us know in the comments. And as a thank you for watching this Sunday motivational video until the very end, we saved you a bonus. The gold is in what you know that others don't. The more we've looked at the list that we explored today, you know, the more we realize that each one of them requires a slight information edge in order to make money.

In any of these 15, you need to have an informational, unfair advantage. You need to know something other people don't. That's where the profit is. So the most practical piece of advice you could take away from this is to look at your own life and identify the thing that you spend time learning about because it's fun. Sure, there's definitely something you do for fun that other people would think of as work. That is your gold mine. Once you identify it, figure out where the financial arbitrage is and go after the money. Nobody gets into any of these businesses because they have a calling too. They all do it because the money is there in the beginning and you get good at it over time, make some small changes, and then turn it into your calling, not the other way around.

This is why finding your passion is kind of bullshit because it assumes it's something you don't already have, that you need to go out there and find it somewhere else and until you do, you'll never be complete. The most valuable advice you'll ever get is do it for the money in the early days and figure out how to navigate it from there. It's easier to move faster when you've got some gas in the tank. If the end of this video fired you up, write the word fire in the comments. Let's see how many of you are doing it for the money right now.