Balance Your Bets With Safe and Boring

This column was originally published on RealMoney on Sept. 13 at 12:23 p.m. EST. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

You buy shares in Research in Motion or Network Appliance because they have the potential to appreciate a lot more than the market. But owning Research in Motion also means knowing you might be wrong and being forced to sell it before it goes down a lot. A diversified portfolio should include a few low-beta investments to balance out these hot potatoes.

Enter infrastructure products sold by Macquarie Bank. One of the five biggest banks in Australia, Macquarie has carved out quite a niche buying incredibly boring businesses like toll roads and parking lots and packaging them into investment products for sale to the public.

Macquarie has five funds listed in Australia, one in Canada, one in Singapore and three here in the U.S. on the NYSE. The bank also has six private infrastructure funds. The three U.S. products -- two closed-end funds and one structured as a trust -- are very similar: They provide predictable price action and large dividends....