Browsing: Operationally Intensive Real Assets

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 8, Issue 1 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association. Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA MembershipRead More

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has taken a 30% stake in Bayfront Infrastructure Management. Clifford Capital, with the backing of the government of Singapore, has the other 70%. They have created Bayfront (with a combined capitalization of $180 million) to mobilize  a pool of infrastructure investors in the expectation thatRead More

The CFA Institute, in conjunction with the African Stock Exchanges Association (ASEA), has put together a book on the challenges and opportunities in the African capital markets. In Africa as elsewhere, fortune favors the bold. For example—and this is not an example from the ASEA and CFA Institute’s book—the EnkoRead More

The Alternative Investment Management Association first opened a branch in Canada in 2003. In recent days, AIMA has posted a report on what it calls the “landscape.” It doesn’t mean the Rockies. It means the lay of the land for alternative investments in that country. AIMA’s report looks at aRead More

The term “greenwashing” is not a compliment. It isn’t supposed to be a good thing. Greenwashing means the re-spraying of old products and services so that they seem to comply with standards for socially responsible investment. Many investors want to put their money to work in ways that reflect theirRead 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

Cushman & Wakefield, Chicago, has released a discussion of blockchains in connection with real estate. The paper argues that the technology could “transform CRE transactions ranging from property listings, asset management, and the purchase and sale of properties.” It reminds us that blockchains are shared digital ledgers, both tamper-proof andRead More

The illiquidity premium is one of the most frequently discussed and hotly disputed subjects in financial economics. Speaking broadly, an investment is not a checking account. One generally cannot just “get the cash back” at a moment’s notice, by visiting some equivalent of an ATM. How long will it takeRead 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

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the London-based professional services network, in conjunction with the Urban Land Institute, has prepared a report on ongoing trends in real estate, which sheds some light on the attractions of alternative real estate. The background to the report is the continued and intensifying consensus that a recession is nigh,Read 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

Two scholars affiliated with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Canada, have taken a look at the future of green bonds, that is, bonds whose proceeds are employed to fund environmental initiatives. The paper, by Olaf Weber and Vasundhara Saravade, begins with a guesstimate as to the amount ofRead More

Public pension funds in the United States invest in infrastructure. Unfortunately, they aren’t very good at it. A recent working paper of the NBER concludes, indeed, that public pensions are so bad at such investments that they—and thus either the public or its retirees or both—are unwittingly subsidizing infrastructure projects.Read More

A new paper by Alexander D. Beath and Chris Flynn examines the significance of real estate investing within the portfolios of large European institutional investors from 2005 to 2016. Beath is a senior research analyst with CEM Benchmarking, with a PHD. from McGill University on condensed matter and materials physics.Read More

Deteriorating infrastructure and potential for investment is the topic of a new white paper by Fiera Capital, a Canadian investment management firm. Infrastructure is generally understood to involve physical assets that provide a public service, including those most vital to economic development. The category includes water and waste-water systems, highwaysRead 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

A new paper from bfinance (an independent financial services consultancy headquartered in London) discusses the “dramatically different era” into which infrastructure investing has entered over the last two years. The paper, “DNA of a Manager Search: Infrastructure,” looks at three recent unlisted infrastructure searches, in order to glean some insightRead More

The EDHEC Infrastructure Institute – Singapore has published a new paper describing what it calls the “very first results of an ambitious project to create investment benchmarks for long-term investors in infrastructure.” The Institute is host to a dedicated team, who for years now have been collecting and aggregating primaryRead More

A new study by EDHECinfra (EDHEC’s infrastructure institute based in Singapore), has a striking point of view on the whole “listed infrastructure” sector, which it says is based on the “fallacy of composition.” In economics and in logic, the term “fallacy of composition” refers to the general prejudice that ifRead More

PWC and the Urban Land Institute have jointly issued a report on “emerging trends in real estate” around the globe, which stresses that real estate’s attraction as an investment, even as a cross-border investment, has held up notwithstanding unprecedented levels of concern about geopolitics. The “global drift back to domesticRead More

BlackRock has published a research report about pension funds in Mexico, a report produced as part of its broader research project looking into the state of the pension fund industry around the globe.  It shows that the cause of alternatrive investments as a group is the cause of diversification forRead More

Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions (Citi GPS) has published a new white paper on the global need for infrastructure spending. The authors are: Jason Channell, head of EMEA Infrastructure Research; Elizabeth Curmi, Global Thematic Analyst; and David Lubin, head of Emerging Markets Economics. Channell et al contend that “now couldRead More

Two portfolio managers (and senior VPs) at Cohen & Steers, in a new white paper, make the case that “listed infrastructure is an attractive complement to private investments, providing long-term portfolio solutions for real asset allocations.” Cohen & Steers, a New York headquartered global investment manager, recommends that institutions allocateRead 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

In a new article in The Journal of Alternative Investments, three EDHEC-affiliated scholars, led by Frédéric Blanc-Brude, the director of the EDHEC Infrastructure, Singapore, look at recent improvements in the understanding of the financial performance of privately held infrastructure investments, debt or equity, with respect to benchmarking thereof.  They concludeRead More

On November 7, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put out a statement that said that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) had agreed to halt its controversial ongoing construction in North Dakota. The following day, which happens to have been Election Day, [so non-election news went largely uncovered], the ownersRead More

McKinsey & Co. has posted a new report assessing the state and the future of the North American asset management industry, encompassing both active and passive managers and looking at five mega-trends. Skipping to the chase, the trends are these: The end of an anomalous eta of “exceptional investment returns.”Read 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

The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate has issued a new report urging governments and major financial institutions to “scale up and shift investment to sustainable infrastructure as a fundamental strategy….” The report, The Sustainable Infrastructure Imperative, has no force as law or policy anywhere, but it may signalRead More

Kyle Bass, the investor who shorted the market in residential mortgage-based securities a decade ago, with speculator success, is interested now in shorting the major pharmaceutical companies. He is certainly entitled to try that play. But what is especially provocative and controversial is that he also seems willing to giveRead 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

A new paper from EDHEC Infrastructure Institute decides that there is no such thing as a listed infrastructure asset class. What is the practical significance of that inference?  It means that for investors (individual or institutional) looking to diversify their portfolio properly, a dedicated index focused on a listed infrastructureRead More

By Charles Skorina For executive recruiters like us, that’s a question we’ll have to wrestle with as we present candidates to the boards of institutional asset managers. Two of our investment-management village elders–Bill Gross and Burton Malkiel–say we’re staring down the barrel of a low-return decade.  They’ve been around for aRead More

EDHEC Infrastructure Institute-Singapore recently released a paper on the cash flow dynamics of private infrastructure project debt. The gist of the paper is that investors’ ability to understand credit risk in private infrastructure debt turns on advanced statistical techniques. Or, in the authors’ words, “the nature of the data requiresRead More

A new paper from EDHEC Infrastructure Institute-Singapore argues that infrastructure firms represent a unique business model, one with lower revenue volatility, higher payouts, and substantially lower correlation with the business cycle than other firms. An “infrastructure firm” for purposes of this discussion is either a special purpose vehicle created inRead More

IBM has now purchased Strongloop, and this has gotten Faille thinking about APIs, a potential multi-trillion dollar market. Where technology's imperatives press again the law: how to bet? Read More

Guest columnist Jill Eicher looks at how public pension funds are cutting out the middle man and leveraging the power of their own capital for infrastructure investments.Read More

Guest columnist Andrew Smith, CAIA, provides an overview of real assets and their commensurate risks and rewards.Read More

An idea for the hierarchical design of a platform's APIs, and a particular expression of that idea, walk into a bar. What's the punch line? Read More

PwC offers a glimpse of a 'day in the life' of a typical compliance analyst in 2015 and again in 2020. As these authors tell it, the day is filled with data, darkness, and drudgery at present, but it will be airy, alliterative, and analytical in another five years. Read More

There was some excitement as recently as January 2015 over renewed talk of a Yahoo/AOL deal, but after the bloom finally came off that rose, YHOO settled into a trading range has been roughly from $42 to $46. Faille guesses that there is an opportunity here on the upside of that range, because another suitor is bound to appear.Read More

The Solicitor General, speaking for the United States, has filed the expected amicus brief in the Google/Oracle showdown. The SG's position is that the Supreme Court should refuse to hear the case so that the lower courts can get back to using what the brief calls the "flexible fair use doctrine" to do justice. Read More

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

High-stakes litigation between Google and Oracle approaches its resolution at the Supreme Court. For seekers of alpha, this isn't just about what investments to make, but about the way one goes about making them, the very mechanics of trading. Read More

Guest columnist Diane Harrison looks at the world of alternatives to alternatives, including stamps, cars, farmland and more...Read More

A party seeking to employ an expert witness is supposed to let the other side know who the expert is in advance of trial. Fans of a classic Joe Pesci movie will remember that it isn't necessary to join the prosecutor in a hunting lodge. Read More

The Confederation of British Industry has taken a look at some of the issues that do and should concern investors in the industries of those islands. Among much else, the CBI wants the government to kick-start the private placement market. And to worry more about infrastructure. Read More

Three authors at EDHEC propose a two-step modeling process for the valuation of certain infrastructure debt. One of the key ideas they incorporate is the value of the step-in rights that come when the issuers violate a covenant or otherwise find themselves in technical default. Read More

For one professor, the surprising divergence in the prices of WTI/Brent crude in the period 2010-2012 was a case study in how commodity prices can teach us about supply chain conditions. Faille looks back at his article, and forward past today's calmer but still-fluctuating spread. Read More

The first of the three patents cited by the plaintiffs was filed at a time when the crowdfunding exemption movement was making a fair amount of noise on Capitol Hill, though it had not yet had tangible success. One might already entertain certain suspicions. Read More