Browsing: Natural Resources and Land

A new study from Nuveen looks at how to assess properly the value of real estate and farmland. There are four key points: That a “doubleness” of vision is necessary. You need to take a macro view of the investment world and a micro view of the farms and otherRead More

An arm of Brookfield Asset Management, Brookfield Infrastructure, announced that it is leading a group of investors to buy Genesee & Wyoming for a cash payment of $112 per share, a premium of nearly 40% over the pre-announcement stock price. This is a big infrastructure play. G&W is a freightRead More

The agricultural sector is under pressure from several directions, including depressed commodity prices, increased regulation, climate change, and changes in consumer tastes. This pressure creates a demand for technological progress, and that in turn creates a market for agtech. Two years ago, Finisterre Ventures and Pitchbook combined their data gatheringRead More

In creating the real assets portion of a portfolio, investors should consider several risk factors, such as the sensitivity of certain assets to inflation, interest rate changes (duration risk), or the continued availability of finance (illiquidity risk). In a recent publication, Mercer, the world’s largest institutional investment advisor, explains howRead More

A recent study of public employee retirement systems in the United States reaches conclusions, that, after a fair amount of “grey tsunami” alarmism in recent years, sound reassuring. The study, based on a recent survey of system managements conducted by the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) inRead More

A new study by two scholars, an American and an Italian, presents evidence that financial markets are pricing the risk of reliance upon carbon, penalizing carbon-intensive assets and rewarding low-carbon assets. Irene Monasterolo and Luca de Angelis, respectively of Boston University and the University of Bologna, begin with the ParisRead More

An agtech-focused venture firm has issued a report about global VC activity across agtech and its subsectors. The firm, Finistere Ventures, which describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” collaborated with Pitchbook in preparing the review. Finistere looks specifically at: (a) macro trends,Read More

Finistere Ventures, a venture capital firm that describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” has teamed up with Pitchbook to produce a dataset that would enable “clear insights into financing activity and metrics in the agtech sector.” The result was the Agtech InvestmentRead More

KPMG has posted a new paper looking at the role of real assets (defined as “anything where there is a tangible/physical asset being traded”) within a portfolio, with a focus on opportunities for U.K. based institutional investors, especially pension schemes. It begins with a brief survey of the field. RealRead More

New Forests, an Australia-based investment manager focusing on strategies in forestry, land management, and conservation, has published its 2017 Timberland Investment Outlook. This paper begins with the observation that institutional investment in timberland now amounts to more than $100 billion. This makes it still a “relatively small” asset class, butRead More

On May 3, 2017, Ernst & Young made available the bullet points for a presentation on the “accounting, financial reporting, and regulatory considerations” affecting investment vehicles in this space. Mark to market or historic cost In general, the presentation says, the accounting treatment depends on where on a spectrum ofRead More

Agrifrance recently posted a report looking at the French wine industry, with an especial focus on export to the United States. The U.S. “has been the world’s leading wine market by value since 2013,” says the company head, Benoit Léchenault, in a preface to the report. France is the secondRead More

Today, we’ll look at  KPMG’s effort to determine who exactly the investors in timberland are, what their underwriting assumptions are, and what are their expectations for the coming 12 months. The firms surveyed included North America’s timberland investment market participants with five different structures: appraisal or consulting organizations; integrated forestRead More

It’s an old debate: does socially responsible investing under its variations (including “impact investing”) come at a cost in terms of risk-adjusted performance? Or does it actually add a dividend, so that one does well by doing good? Or are impact and non-impact investing in otherwise comparable assets on aRead More

Highquest Partners and a product strategist for timber and agriculture at GMO LLC (Julie Koeninger) have collaborated on a white paper on the history of farmland investment, at its heart the story, first, of how farmland has grown (since the late 1980s and the rebound from the farm crisis earlierRead More

Preqin has turned its Spotlight on Real Assets in a new publication, drawing our attention in particular to metals and mining. Among the institutional investors that say they are targeting unlisted metals and mining focused funds over the coming twelve months, Preqin names three as “samples”:  the Compagnia di SanRead More

A recent working paper from the European Corporate Governance Institute discusses direct investment by sovereign wealth funds in private equity transactions – that is, it discusses an ongoing shift from investing in PE funds to co-investing with PE funds. The paper describes this as a trend especially viable in theRead More

Biff Ourso, TIAA’s portfolio manager for agriculture investments, says in a prefatory message to their new report that “concerns have been raised about whether investment in regions such as Brazil contribute to land conflicts, lead to the displacement of local people … or foster excessive pesticide usage.” TIAA, which hasRead More

Fundraising for agriculture/farmland-focused funds has been remarkably strong recently, according to research by Preqin, the multi-national data and consulting firm. Farmland has been aptly described as the “oldest alternative investment” and dates as far back as 9,000 years ago. The focus on Preqin’s special report on agriculture is somewhat more recentRead More

A recent academic discussion of the much-vexed question of Islamic finance (including the always at least implicit query, how does it fit into the broader usually non-Islamic global picture?) focuses on the role in Islam of real assets, understood as tangible objects such as land, buildings, machinery, and commodities. TheRead More

Preqin, the multinational data and consulting firm, has looked at the second quarter and found it was, for private capital fundraising  … slow. So was the quarter before it. Together they made up the first half of 2016, in which the funds closed in the world of private capital globallyRead More

The popularity of the drip coffee maker is in decline, or at least it has passed its peak.  In 2013. 58% of coffee drinkers had used such a coffee maker on the day before the day they were asked, that is, “yesterday.” That number was down to 54% in 2014,Read More

"Not moving is more risky than moving," said one CEO asked about mergers and acquisitions. "We will make more acquisitions, but they’ll probably be larger in nature, more transformative. " Read More

Guest columnist Andrew Smith, CAIA, examines the risks and rewards of investing directly in farmland.Read More

What is the big picture for these authors? Are China and the U.S. trading places, so that China will have a middle class and the U.S. won’t? No. What is happening is a bit more subtle than that. Read More

Given reasonable assumptions, one might expect that those investing in commingled products offering exposure to agriculture would take part in both good investment returns and diversification benefits. Alas, though, GFIA found no such thing, and considers the possibility that agriculture as an asset class has decoupled from fundamentals. Read More