Robert Burns once wrote that John Barleycorn was a “Hero of noble enterprise.” That said, not even Burns could have predicted that a bottle of “good Scotch drink” would be listed on the World Whiskey exchange for €65.000,00.

Now, it’s unlikely that you can nip off down to the local liquor store and find a 1919 bottle of 50-year-old Springbank. That said, there’s a couple of tips for those looking to speculate in the single-malt market.

This is not another article about placing hard earned money in another incomprehensible and confusing investment. The financial world is already awash with these. CFD’s. Forex. ETF’s. And despite this increasingly mind-numbing procession of acronyms, two things remain true. First, it has taken the British stock market half a decade to return to somewhere near the value that preceded the Global Financial Crisis, essentially performing a five-year exercise in treading water. Hardly a standout return. And second, one cannot hold or truly feel passion about owning any one of these investments.

Which brings us to Whisky. While the more traditional function of the drink in the business world has been as an addition to a CEO’s corner office, or as part of a celebratory toast following a deal, recent trends confirm that buying and holding Whisky is now a serious investment option.

On a fateful afternoon in May of 2010, a computer programmer in New York exchanged 10,000 bitcoins for two pies of pizza. At the time, the idea of bitcoin was still hidden in relative obscurity outside of a small circle of enthusiasts, and very few people were paying attention. After all, each bitcoin was valued at only a couple of cents, and it apparently took 5,000 of them to buy a single pizza. Today, if the pizza chef has held on to his bitcoin collection, he is sitting on a fortune valued at $1.2 million dollars!

This begs the question: what exactly are bitcoins, and why should they be on the radar of any serious investor?

In difficult financial times such as those that so much of the world are currently living in, many industries and stocks can be quite unpredictable. Economic instability breeds uncertainty in everyone from consumers to investors, and unfortunately this creates a kind of cycle that makes poor economies very difficult to predict. Within this sort of climate, it can be difficult for private investors to find opportunities to secure and expand their finances without a large degree of risk. This is why some private investors opt to look outside of ordinary stock markets at alternative investment opportunities – such as precious metals.