Part 1 begins with an introduction to alternative investments and a description of the environment of alternative investing. Chapters 3 to 6 include primers on quantitative methods, statistics, and financial economics as they relate to alternative investments, as well as a chapter on measures of risk and return. The last three chapters of Part 1 discuss performance attribution, hypothesis testing of risk and return, and multivariate and nonlinear methods. The material is designed to provide a foundation for Parts 2 to 5, which detail each of the four main categories of alternative investments.