I was curious if you believe if it would be a good idea to invest in other assets class

I do that, or at least I make a gesture to doing that. My thinking is exactly the same as yours. The markets, as is often said, are not the economy, and there's a lot out there that we miss out on. A long time ago I read that CPPIB has a lot of real estate, and I thought, well, maybe I should, too. Maybe I should try to overweight real estate a bit.

But for ordinary non-accredited retail investor peasants like most of us, it's harder to get access to private equity and private real estate investment, like /u/bluejazzy11 says. The obvious ways, like funding a business or buying an apartment block, expose you to huge risk and headache. My approach, which I concede is flawed, has been to overweight REITs and Brookfield LPs-- just a bit-- as a sort of half-assed proxy for the real estate, private equity, and alternative asset classes.

Whether that provides meaningful diversification or increases my returns is a whole nuther matter. Indexers will invariably say it doesn't, and that it's extra headache, and maybe they're right. Canadian REITs in particular track the stock market as a whole, and aren't as linked to interest rates as many people believe they are. Look at this chart. The filled-in blue area is XIC, going back to 2006. The red line is ZRE, which is iShares's capped REIT index. They're pretty tight, although that chart doesn't include the distributions, which would be higher for ZRE.

I was going to put BAM.A on there as well for comparison, but it would have ironed out the graph. BAM.A has gone up six-fold in that period! But like I often pontificate, nobody has ever gone broke by owning Brookfield.

FWIW, this is what I do. I'm not saying it's what anyone else should do, and I'm sure it's suboptimal, but it's what makes me comfortable. (a) I have about 5% in individual REITs or REIT-like investments. Those are MRG.UN, HR.UN, and BPY.UN. (b) I have about 5% in Brookfields. Those are BAM.A, BIP.UN, and BPY.UN. (Yes, I know BPY.UN is counted twice.)