America, apple pie and a Chevrolet in the driveway. That, as they say, is the American way. The automobile sitting in the driveway is the second most expensive hard asset — next to the single-family home — most people invest in during their lifetimes.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. It is doubtful those exact words, the construct of Ralph Waldo Emerson, were drifting through Mary Tiedemann’s mind during a fateful October 2005 lunch with her son, though the sentiments behind Emerson’s words were certainly present. So were notions that son Michael Tiedemann, CEO of Tiedemann Wealth Management, had been blessed with some enviable advantages in life. After all, Mary Tiedemann’s husband, Michael’s father, Carl Tiedemann was a partner at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where he was president during the 1970s and helped take the firm public. He also founded Tiedemann Wealth Management, as well as a hedge fund in 1980 that is still operating today, 37 years later.

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in a subfield called “behavioral finance.” This field, which Kahneman pioneered (along with Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler) in the late 1970s, attempts to explain why economic decision making often differs from what the neo-classical theory suggests “rational actors” should do.

Commodities just had their worst start in seven years. The S&P GSCI Total Return lost 10.2 percent year-to-date (YTD) ending June 30, 2017, logging its worst first- half performance since the first six months of 2010 when it lost 11.2 percent.

It is easy to be skeptical of the hype surrounding the next “green” energy technology that is going to lift us into a blissful future of sustainability.

Autonomous vehicle technology could shrink the auto insurance sector by 71 percent or $137 billion by 2050, according to new research by KPMG. The big accounting and consulting firm extended its actuarial model by 10 years to 2050, finding that the pace of change has accelerated, pushing projections that illustrate greater declines to the insurance sector than KPMG’s previous 2015 study. It also shows an increasing need for new types of insurance products.

Recent news on trade wars over Canadian timber has put back into the limelight this relatively sleepy asset. As this magazine has noted in the past, timber is a “classic” real asset worthy of consideration in portfolio construction. Again, its “classic” status is due to both the asset’s characteristics and its general longevity as a real asset, which has sped its academic acceptance as a part of modern portfolio theory. The characteristics of the asset are well known: a hedge on inflation, a safe haven, long dated, and generally relatively uncorrelated with equity markets. In turn, timber has been around for a long time and as such there is strong academic research on its place in a portfolio.

BlackRock Real Assets has completed the final close for its Global Renewable Power II fund with $1.65 billion in commitments secured from 67 investors in North America, Europe and Asia. The final close has exceeded the initial fund target size of $1 billion, reflecting strong investor demand for the renewable power asset class.

Earlier this year, Jack Jacobs unveiled GridShare, a crowdfunding platform solely targeting renewable energy projects. Jacobs, the company’s cofounder, asserts that GridShare is the only organization doing renewable energy, equity-based crowdfunding.

Impact investing — the choice to make investments with a positive social impact — is gaining momentum among institutional investors. According to a 2016 Global Impact Investment Survey, assets under management in this sector increased from $25.4 billion in 2013 to $35.5 billion in 2015, indicating substantial growth and strong investor appetite for social impact investments.

Growing concern about the long-term prospects for in-store retail is creating a slowdown in the sale of shopping centers. Retail property sales in the second quarter of 2017 fell 45.9 percent year-over-year, and first-half sales are 26 percent below 2016, according to preliminary data from Real Capital Analytics. Sales declined in several segments of retail, led by lifestyle/power centers, single-tenant and drug stores.