iShares launched Monday the iShares Diversified Alternatives Trust (NYSEArca: ALT) with the goal of putting at investors' reach an exchange-traded product that enables them to access alternative assets without the usual illiquidity concerns and costly price tag.

ALT's portfolio comprises exchange-traded futures contracts of everything from commodities, currencies and interest rates to stock and bond indexes, as well as foreign currency forward contracts. The trust does not track a benchmark. In fact, it is the first actively managed exchange-traded product to be launched under the iShares brand; it's also one of the first managed futures products to hit the market.

ALT's overall investment strategy looks at relative value; it capitalizes on the spread between assets and asset categories that deviate from the norm. For such, and in an effort to minimize volatility, it takes both long and short positions in correlated assets.

Altogether, ALT will use a combination of strategies to capitalize on various spread opportunities including technical and fundamental strategies as well as yield and futures curve arbitrage.

The arbitrage strategy involves the trust seeking returns from interest rate and futures contract price differentials by taking long and short positions in various contracts that it considers to be mispriced relative to one another.

As part of its technical strategy, the trust will try to benefit from the difference between an asset's historical returns and its recent performance. And, finally, its fundamental strategy involves attempting to generate returns by exploiting discrepancies between the market and the fundamental value of a given asset.

Its portfolio targets an annualized return volatility of 6 to 8 percent.

"It is designed to be a transparent, efficient way to access well-documented, difficult to execute trading strategies often used by institutional investors for alternatives exposures," the company stated in a release.

ALT charges an annual expense ratio of 0.95 percent.

Read the prospectus for ALT here.