This article considers several sets of financial practices commonly defined as alternative either by commentators or practitioners themselves. In each case, it also explores the real or potential harnessing of these alternatives into dominant financial arrangements, demonstrating the cycling in as well as the cycling out of these practices into harmonization with the dominant. That harmonization raises questions about the distinction between the alternative and the dominant, revealing both to be simultaneously socially embedded and disembedded, and raising questions about the implications of the continual ‘discovery’ of and hope for a more ‘social’ finance.