I believe there are lots of ways to generate returns on assets in compounding ways, and I'm interested in ways people in the HN community are using their skills, knowledge, and analytical brains to do this.

I'm not so interested in pure speculation per se -- in fact, one of my reasons for looking for alternatives to the stock market is that many stocks themselves meet the characteristics of speculation to me. (Just because you wrap it in quantitative comparisons to related-industry multiples and so on doesn't mean the whole market isn't overvalued.)

Thus precious metals, bitcoins, etc. aren't very interesting to me either, though they're interesting enough suggestions (as alternatives to leaving assets in dollars, if nothing else) for the purposes of this discussion.

That all said, I'm willing to take lots of risk in small doses, if the return dynamics are there.

Angel investing meets a lot of the criteria for me (and I've done some), but I don't have enough capital to make many bets of typical angel investment size, ie to have a sufficiently diversified portfolio to get EV returns.