MORE THAN MONEY separates those who are simply rich from the jaw-droppingly wealthy, especially when it comes to putting money into alternative investments.

There's a knowledge gap for most investors when it comes to vehicles like hedge funds, which pulled in $126.5 billion in new money last year. The mega rich have ease getting in and chasing out of alternative investments, but most advisors are hesitant to recommend these for folks in the mass-affluent bracket.

 Help may be on the way, though. More advisors have resources to get a facility with these funds. For instance, an advisor can now get a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) certification, a professional designation created by the Center for International Securities and Derivatives Markets, a research group based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and the Alternative Investment Management Association, a nonprofit trade group. About 750 people now hold the CAIA certification, 350 of whom completed their training last year.

 "If you're thinking about advising others in this investment area, you really should know about the attendant risks yourself," says Nelson Lacey, an associate professor of finance at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts and supervisor of CAIA's certification exam program. "At a minimum, you'll want to be able to look" at a hedge fund, private-equity fund or other alternative asset class, "and you'll be able to evaluate its risks, look at the historical returns it's achieved and would know how that helps you diversify in this market."

A CAIA certification doesn't teach advisors to decide if mass affluent clients should take the plunge, but supplies the tools to start evaluating individual funds and see if these often pricey investments fit in with their long-term goals.

 "A lot of new clients come to us, and they don't quite understand what they're looking for," says Dick Pfister, executive vice president of Altegris, a La Jolla, Calif., broker-dealer specializing in alternative investments. "They say 'I'm not quite sure how hedge funds work or how they're structured, but they look interesting and are different from what I have in my portfolio.' That's what a trained analyst is supposed to help you with."

 Of course, the first thing a prospective first-time investor will learn is that they're not for everyone. While domestic equity mutual funds average an expense ratio of about 1.5%, hedge funds usually charge an annual 2% fee and take 20% of profits. Funds of hedge funds, a common alternative investment entry point for mass affluent investors, spread money through a range of hedge funds using different strategies. An investor generally pays a 1% management fee and 10% of the fund-of-fund's profits on top of the singly managed fund costs.

 Most single-manager funds limit the number of investors and require minimum commitments of $1 million to $5 million, making this a serious commitment for someone with even a $5 million portfolio. Funds of funds require lower minimum commitments, often around $250,000. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citibank and Goldman Sachs, offer in-house fund-of-funds through their private client banking divisions, though those often require more assets than a mass affluent investor actually has, Pfister says.

William Feeley, a CAIA certificate holder and independent consultant in Granger, Ind., says mass affluent investors can put alternative investments to good use, even in modest portfolios, but they shouldn't expect the headline-grabbing returns of well-known managers such as George Soros or elite funds like SAC Capital. Instead, he says, look at the funds that report to hedge fund indexes such as the one run by CISDM.

 In short, the best alternative investments for people who only just qualify to buy them can actually be pretty dull. They aren't after home-run numbers, but offer the appeal of not being so directly linked to the direction of the market.

 But the financial-services industry sometimes has a hard time conveying this to an upper-middle-class client base with increasingly complex advisory needs.

 "The great preponderance of financial advisors and financial consultants and brokers mostly work for enterprises whose compliance teams want nothing to do with their employees providing information and advice to this class of client on that subject," he says. "They don't provide the training or broadly authorize the sale of products that might well serve that need."

 Roxanne Alexander, a senior vice president at the Miami advisory firm Evensky & Katz, where client portfolios range between $2 million and $5 million, says the CAIA program helped familiarize her with the complexities of alternative investments.

Her firm eventually used a fund of funds to put a piece of its clients' money into an uncorrelated investment, but part of it was tied up in the 2005 failure of futures brokerage Refco. The fund of funds manager made good on the 11% loss from that part of the portfolio, she says.

 Alexander says the experience underscored the risk of going into less regulated asset classes.

 "The dividing line is whether you can afford to possibly lose that money," she says. If it's a question for you or your advisor, the answer's already clear.