One of the most memorable evenings of Gloria Nelund’s life took place in April 2005 at the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue in Manhattan. Nelund was CEO of Deutsche Bank’s $50 billion North America private wealth division at the time, and she and her handpicked executive team were having a soiree. The food was bountiful, the wine flowed freely and the team’s esprit was sky high.  There was much to celebrate. When Nelund took the helm in 2001, the private wealth division was losing $130 million a year. By first quarter 2005, the reformulated operation was solidly in the black and touting a whopping 25 percent profit margin.

Your phone alarm goes off. It is 6 a.m. in San Francisco and the fog is heavy, so the sun has yet to peek through the window of the room you rented from Airbnb.

After a quick shower, you order a self-driving taxi to take you to work. Though you usually telecommute to work from rural Napa, it is Wednesday, so it is time to attend the once-a-week meeting at your firm’s recently 3D-printed office in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City.

Passively managed funds, including exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and index funds, have grown 73 percent over a six-year period, increasing from 11 percent of global assets under management (AUM) in 2009 to 19 percent in 2015. Within this segment, ETFs have been growing at an annual growth rate of approximately 25 percent over the past decade, with AUM above $3 trillion. Institutions, too, are increasingly using ETFs for core exposures and access to smart beta strategies. In a study by Greenwich Associates, 36 percent of the institutional equity ETF users expected to increase their allocations to ETFs in the year ahead, while that number was 35 percent for institutional bond ETF users.

Technology is destined to change the way the commercial real estate market operates, but a debate is raging as to how and how much. Will it create a sea change in the industry, or will the impact be less than transformational?

Certainly, technology has revolutionized the daily lives of most people — including the way they communicate, work, shop, eat and entertain. Yet some industry analysts contend that technological change has been slow to take root, and commercial real estate generally operates as it always has.

As Donald Trump likes to say, “China is beating us on everything.” While that’s a debatable proposition, there is one area where China is far ahead of the United States, and that is in resilient transportation systems.

In her new book, The Grid, Gretchen Bakke argues that the underfunded power grid is not capable of taking the United States into a new energy future. According to Bakke, the United States does not run on gas, oil, coal or wind or solar power. Rather, it runs on the electricity those energy sources create, and that electricity is being delivered to homes and industry via an electrical grid that is increasingly unstable, underfunded and unreliable.

Global fish stocks cannot keep up with the rapid rise in consumption, putting pressure on wild fish stocks and suggesting that aquaculture will play an ever increasing role in attempting to fill that gap.

A classic real asset worthy of consideration in portfolio construction is timber. 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.

Amtrak has contracted for the manufacture of 28 next-generation high-speed trainsets that will replace the equipment used to provide Amtrak’s premium Acela Express service. The contract is part of $2.45 billion that will be invested on the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor as part of a modernization program to renew and expand the Acela Express service.

There are few real assets more majestic than a mammoth cargo ship or oil tanker creasing the waters of the world’s oceans. Their immensity and the sprawling wake fanning out behind them speak of industrial might.