Is there any instrument with real-estate-like returns?
Similarly to buying property on your own, REITs cannot get to good returns without leveraging. If you buy an investment property 100% cash only - chances are that 10% ROI is a very very optimistic scenario. If you use leveraging (i.e.: take out a mortgage) - you're susceptible to interest rate changes. REITs invest in properties all around all the time. They invest in mortgages themselves as well (In the US, that's the only security REITs can hold without being disqualified). You can't expect all that to be cash-only, there have to be loans and financing involved. When rates go up - financing costs go up. That brings net income down. Simple math. In the US, there's an additional benefit to investing in REIT vs directly holding real estate: taxes. REITs pay dividends, which have preferential (if qualified) taxation. You'll pay capital gains taxes on the dividends if you hold the fund long enough. If you own a rental property directly, your income after all the expenses is taxed at ordinary rates, which would usually be higher. Also, as you mentioned, you can use them as margin, and they're much much more liquid than holding real estate directly. Not to mention you don't need to deal with tenants or periods where you don't have any, or if local real-estate market tanks (while REITs are usually quite diversified in kinds of real estate they hold and areas). On the other hand, if you own real estate, you can leverage it at lower rates than margin (with HELOCs etc), and it provides some safety net in case of a stock market crash (which REITs are somewhat susceptible to). You can also live in your property, if needed, which is something that's hard to do with REITs....
That's a broad question, but I can throw some thoughts at you from personal experience.  I'm actually an Australian who has worked in a couple of companies but across multiple countries and I've found out first hand that you have a wealth of opportunities that other people don't have, but you also have a lot of problems that other people won't have. First up, asset classes. Real estate is a popular asset class, but unless you plan on being in each of these countries for a minimum of one to two years, it would be seriously risky to invest in rental residential or commercial real estate. This is because it takes a long time to figure out each country's particular set of laws around real estate, plus it will take a long time to get credit from the local bank institutions and to understand the local markets well enough to select a good location. This leaves you with the classics of stocks and bonds. You can buy stocks and bonds in any country typically. So you could have some stocks in a German company, a bond fund in France and maybe a mutual fund in Japan. This makes for interesting diversification, so if one country tanks, you can potentially be hedged in another. You also get to both benefit and be punished by foreign exchange movements. You might have made a killing on that stock you bought in Tokyo, but it turns out the Yen just fell by 15%. Doh. And to top this off, you are almost certainly going to end up filling out tax returns in each country you have made money in. This can get horribly complicated, very quickly. As a person who has been dealing with the US tax system, I can tell you that this is painful and the US in particular tries to get a cut of your worldwide income. That said, keep in mind each country has different tax rates, so you could potentially benefit from that as well. My advice? Choose one country you suspect you'll spend most of your life in and keep most of your assets there. Make a few purchases in other places, but minimize it. Ultimately most ex-pats move back to their country of origin as friends, family and shared culture bring them home. "The reason that UltraLong funds and the like are bad isn't because of the leverage ratio. It's because they're compounded daily, and the product of all the doubled daily returns is not mathematically equivalent to the double the long-term return. I'd consider providing big fancy equations using uppercase pi as the 'product of elements in a sequence' operator and other calculus fanciness, but that would be overkill, I don't think I can do TeX here, and I don't know the relevant TeX anyway. Anyway. From the economics theory perspective, the ideal leverage ratio is 1X - that is, unlevered, straight investment. Consider: Using leverage costs money. You know that, surely. If someone could borrow money at N% and invest at an expected N+X%, where X > 0, then they would. They would borrow all the money they could and buy all the S&P500 they could. But when they bought all that S&P500, they'd eventually run out of people who were willing to sell it for that cheap. That would mean the excess return would be smaller. Eventually you'd get to a point where the excess return is... zero? .... well, no, empirically, we can see that it's definitely not zero, and that in the real world that stocks do return more than bonds. Why?  Because stocks are riskier than bonds. The difference in expected return between an index like the S&P500 and a US Treasury bond is due to the relative riskiness of the S&P500, which isn't guaranteed by the US Government to return your principal. Any money that you make off of leverage comes from assuming some sort of a risk. Now, assuming risk can be a profitable thing to do, but there are also a lot of people out there with higher risk tolerance than you, like insurance companies and billionaires, so the market isn't exactly short of people willing to take risks, and you shouldn't expect the returns of ""assuming risk"" in the general case to be qualitatively awesome. Now, it's true that investing in an unlevered fashion is risky also. But that's not an excuse to go leveraged anyway; it's a reason to hold back. In fact, regular stocks are sufficiently risky that most people probably shouldn't be holding a 100% stock portfolio. They should be tempering that risk with bonds, instead, and increasing the size of their bond holdings over time. The appropriate time to use leverage is when you have information which limits your risk. You have done research, and have reason to believe that you understand the future of an individual stock/index better than the rest of the stock market does. You calculate that the potential for achieving returns with leverage outweighs the risks. Then you dump your money into the leveraged position. (In exchange for this, the market receives information about anticipated future returns of this instrument, because of the price movement which occurs as a result of someone putting his money where his mouth is.) If you're just looking to dump money into broad market indicies in a leveraged fashion, you're doing it wrong. There is no free money. (Ed. Which is not to say there's not money. There's lots of money. But if you go looking for the free kind, you won't find it, and may end up with money that you thought was free but was actually quite expensive.) Edit. Okay, so you don't like my answer. I'm not surprised. I'm giving you a real answer instead of a ""make free money"" answer. Okay. Here's your ""how to make free money"" answer. Assume you are using a constant leverage ratio over the length of time you've invested your money, and you don't get to just jump into and out of the market (that's market-timing, not leverage) so you have to stay invested. You're going to have a scenario which falls into one of these categories: The S&P500 historically rises over time. The average rate of return probably exceeds the average interest rate. So the ideal leverage ratio is infinite. Of course, this is a stupid answer in real life because you can't pull that off. Your risk tolerance is too low and you will have trouble finding a lender willing to lend you unsecured money, and you'll probably lose all your money in a crash sooner or later. Ultimately it's a stupid answer because you're asking the wrong question. You should probably ask a better question: ""when I use leverage to gain additional exposure to risk, am I being properly compensated for assuming that risk?""" Yield is almost always the mean rate of return. Then 1.65% yield means that you will see that rate of return inclusive of any coupons.   The way I like think of is that yield is the discount rate used to value the instrument at market value. DONT CONFUSE THE COUPON RATE WITH YIELD. Those are two completely separate things. The best way to invest in college for your kid is to buy an investment property and rent it out. You might think I am really crazy to ask you to you to buy a real estate property when everyone is running from real estate.  Go where others are running away from it. Look where others are not looking. Find out the need for a decent rental property in your city or county and start following the real estate market to understand the real activities including the rental market. I would say follow it for 6 months before jumping in with any investment.  And manage your property with good tenants until your kid is ready to go to college. By the time your kid is ready for college, the property would have been paid off by the rents and you can sell the property to send your kid to college. "I have a friend who had went on a seminar with FortuneBuilders (the company that has Than Merrill as CEO). He told me that one of the things taught in that seminar was how to find funding for the property that you want to flip. One of the things he mentioned was that there are so-called ""hard money"" lenders who are willing to lend you the money for the property in exchange for getting their name on the property title. Last time I checked it looked like here in Florida we had at least Bridgewell Capital and Fairview Commercial Lending that were in that business. These hard money lenders get their investment back when the house is sold. So there is some underlying expectation that the house can be sold with some profit (to reimburse both the lender and you for your work). That friend of mine did tell me that he had flipped a house once but that he did not receive the funding to that from a lender but from an in-law, however it was through a similar arrangement." "A REIT is a real estate investment trust. It is a company that derives most of its gross income from and holds most of its assets in real estate investments, which, in this case, include either real property, mortgages, or both.  They provide a way for investors to get broad exposure in a real estate market without going to buy a bunch of properties themselves.  It also provides diversification within the real estate segment since REITs will often (but not necessarily) have either way more properties than an individual could get or have very large properties (like a few resorts) that would be too expensive for any one investor.  By law, they must pay at least 90% of their taxable income as dividends to investors, so they typically have a good dividend rate (possibly but not necessarily) at the expense of growth of the stock price.  Some of those dividends may be tax advantaged and some will not. An MLP is a master limited partnership.  These trade on the exchange like corporations, but they are not corporations. (Although often used in common language as synonyms, corporation and company are not the same thing.  Corporation is one way to organize a company under the law.)  They are partnerships, and when you buy a share you become a partner in the company.  This is an alternative form of ownership to being a shareholding.  In this case you are a limited partner, which means that you have limited liability as with stock.  The shares may appreciate or not, just like a stock, and you can generally sell them back to the market for a capital gain or loss under the same rules as a stock.  The main difference here from a practical point of view is taxes:  Partnerships (of any type) do no pay tax - Instead their income and costs are passed to the individual partners, who must then include it on their personal returns (Form 1040, Schedule E).  The partnership will send each shareholder a Schedule K-1 form at tax time.  This means you may have ""phantom income"" that is taxable even though cash never flowed through your hands since you'll have to account for the income of the partnership.  Many partnerships mitigate this by making cash distributions during the year so that the partners do actually see the cash, but this is not required.  On the other hand, if it does happen, it's often characterized as a return of capital, which is not taxable in the year that you receive it.  A return of capital reduces your cost basis in the partnership and will eventually result in a larger capital gain when you sell your shares. As with any investment, there are pros and cons to each investment type.  Of the two, the MLP is probably less like a ""regular"" stock since getting the Schedule K-1 may require some extra work at tax time, especially if you've never seen one before.  On the other hand, that may be worth it to you if you can find one that's appreciating in value and still returning capital at a good rate since this could be a ""best of everything"" situation where you defer tax and - when you eventually do pay, you pay at favorable capital gains rates - but still manage to get your cash back in hand before you sell. (In case not clear, my comments about tax are specific to the US.  No idea how this is treated elsewhere.) By real world example, I guess you meant a few tickers in each category?  You can find whole lists online.  I just did a quick search (""list of MLP"" and ""list of REIT""), found a list, and have provided the top few off of the first list that I found.  The lists were alphabetical by company name, so there's no explicit or implicit endorsement of these particular investments. Examples of REIT: Examples of MLP:" I was never trying to prove that negative returns are good. They are devastating for HF, much more than for long only houses (in a downmarket).   My issue is people on Reddit comparing HF performance to S&amp;P. The article talks about the comparison as well. I've never heard of such a thing, but seems like if such a product existed it would be easily manipulated by the big trading firms - simply bet that trading volume will go up, then furiously buy and sell shares yourself to artificially drive up the volume. The fact that it would be so easily manipulated makes me think that no such product exists, but I could be wrong.