China’s electricity demand jumped 5 percent in 2025 — an extra 494 terawatt hours — but for the first time in a decade, coal didn’t rise to meet it. Instead, carbon-free power filled the gap, fueled by surging renewables and steady gains in nuclear and hydro. “At the heart of this transformation is the unprecedented expansion of renewable energy capacity,” says Sharon Feng, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. Over the past decade, China’s ...

Chinese by birth, British by upbringing and American by employment, Mary Pang regards her transcontinental life as a sequence of serendipitous moments. In time they would lead to her current career station as partner and global head of client solutions at Cambridge Associates. Yes, Cambridge, a distinctly British name, derived from the university city in Cambridgeshire, yet, as Americans are prone to doing, adopted as the name of the Boston-based Cambridge Associates, perhaps for its regal overtones. She operates, though, from ...

The world stands at a critical juncture where two powerful forces are converging: an urgent need for clean energy and an explosion in digital infrastructure. Nuclear power, once written off as a relic of the 20th century, is experiencing a dramatic revival. This renaissance isn’t simply about replacing aging coal plants or meeting carbon targets — it’s about fueling an entirely new era defined by artificial intelligence, data centers and the electrification of modern life. As electricity demand surges at rates unseen in decades, nuclear energy is emerging from its long dormancy to become an essential pillar of humanity’s energy future.

Listed railroads are quality businesses that should play an integral part of any listed infrastructure portfolio. The stocks have historically delivered solid returns, but the performance has been disappointing over the past three years due to operational challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant increase in port congestion in 2021 led to deteriorating service metrics. Rail companies had to ...

The darkness that swept over the Venezuelan capital in the predawn hours of Jan. 3, 2026, signaled a profound shift in the nature of modern conflict: the convergence of physical and cyber warfare. While U.S. special operations forces carried out the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a far quieter but equally devastating offensive was ...

Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management: “On the product side, I actually think we’re going to end up with a bit of a pyramid, and if I look at the top of that pyramid is the family office. Family offices have gotten so large and so sophisticated they are institutions. In fact, most of our family office clients today are already 50 percent private in their portfolios.”

Ryan Gibson, co-founder and CIO of Spartan Investment Group, was recently interviewed by Real Assets Adviser editor Mike Consol in a podcast. An edited version of that conversation appears below.

When Hamilton Lane asks private wealth professionals why they incorporate private markets into client portfolios, two reasons consistently rise to the top: the potential for outperformance and diversification. The firm has more to report on the subject here.

A financial adviser in Minnesota with a 24-year unblemished career faced a single, unwarranted customer complaint stemming from post-purchase remorse. The 2024 dispute falsely accused him of forging a signature on an annuity application. The adviser pursued FINRA arbitration to expunge the deceptive blemish from ...

Victor Haghani and James White’s provocative essay, Extrapolators Beware the Money Pump, offers a cautionary tale for investors and their advisers. Originally published as part of their 2023 book The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions, the essay explores how seemingly rational investment behavior — specifically, extrapolating past returns into future expectations — can lead to ...

Picture a vast expanse of land, unfurling under open skies. At first glance, it appears to be a humble stretch of earth, but the buzz of transmission towers and substations nearby signify electric promise. To the untrained eye, it may look like mere soil and grass, but to investors, it’s a gold mine. This is what has become known as powered land: infrastructure-furnished sites either with a confirmed connection to the grid or contracts in place. The future-proofed land has ...

What happened in Venezuela may turn out to be the most consequential energy and geopolitical event of the decade. In a swift, coordinated operation that stunned the world, U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s longtime socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro. Nearly as swiftly, President Donald Trump declared the United States will not only rebuild the country’s devastated oil infrastructure but also ...

Bitcoin has plummeted from its October 2025 peak of more than $126,000 to as low as $60,000 early in the morning of Feb. 6, 2026. After hitting that low, it rebounded to about $70,000 that afternoon. The peak-to-bottom drop represented a more than 50 percent collapse in just four months. Feb. 5, 2026, alone saw bitcoin drop more than 10 percent, its steepest single-day decline since the FTX collapse in November 2022. In my Nov. 12, 2025, article for Morningstar, I reviewed economist Campbell Harvey’s analysis comparing gold and bitcoin as safe-haven assets. While Harvey found both could play roles in diversified portfolios, he concluded that ...

Gold is on a historic run. After hitting more than 50 new all-time highs during 2025, the yellow metal has surged to a new all-time high above $5,000 an ounce, a once-unthinkable amount. It’s now doubled in value since September 2024. Meanwhile, silver, the “poor man’s gold,” is not so poor any longer, having smashed through $110 an ounce. As for where we go from here, analysts are making some bold forecasts. Goldmans Sachs just ...

Welcome to the super cycle — where space servers, robot butlers and AI agents converge to reshape everything we thought we knew about economic growth. The core claim being made by ARK Investment Management in its latest Big Ideas report is that five distinct innovation platforms (artificial intelligence, public blockchains, robotics, energy storage and multiomics) are no longer developing in their own lanes. The catchphrase for 2026 is ...

Max Jackson is managing director and private credit portfolio manager at Ballast Rock Asset Management. He previously served as a vice president at KeyBanc Capital Markets on its utilities, power and renewable energy investment banking team.

The Republican Study Committee (RSC), a group of U.S. House Republicans, recently released two policy blueprints: the 2026 Budget and the Reconciliation 2.0 framework that prescribe tax and spending options to boost “affordability and prosperity” for Americans.  These blueprints offer some simple, pro-growth options, but include ideas that would add to tax complexity.

As the investment landscape evolves, financial advisers and port­folio managers are increasingly integrating private market strate­gies — such as private real estate, private credit and private equity — into model portfolios.

In a sponsored interview published in the March issue of Real Assets Adviser, Steve Kirschner, senior vice president – National Institutions at Redwood Investment Management, explains how the firm is working to make private real estate debt available to individual investors by focusing on managing risks before thinking about returns.