When confronted with an unfamiliar situation, it is natural to fall back on routines and processes that have worked in similar situations. So it has been with infrastructure. 

As a market, institutional infrastructure investing has slowly but surely been creating tools that practitioners — whether pension and other investors, investment managers, the public sector, or anyone else with a stake in the market — can use to determine the performance of investments.

During the past 15 to 20 years, infrastructure has evolved from being largely government funded to allowing for private investor participation. One subsector within infrastructure investing that U.S. investors are learning more about is ports, and as these assets become more available to investors, many struggle with where to begin.