Investing late in any investment cycle is full of downside risk. And just about every major asset class seems fully — if not over — valued right now. Even infrastructure, which is still considered to be less correlated to stocks, bonds and real estate, has experienced steadily rising valuations driven by loads of dry powder and sustained fundraising activity.

Space is more important to modern business than most investors realize. It plays a role in making food, pricing insurance and steering self-driving cars. While moon-shot projects from SpaceX and Blue Origin drive headlines, the Earth-facing space economy is booming thanks to plummeting costs of entry. As tech companies large and small compete to launch thousands of satellites, it is easy to forget that space used to be the domain of national governments. Today, it is fast becoming the arena of private enterprise.

The following report reviews highlights of some of the events and trends affecting global listed infrastructure companies in recent months. The Global Listed Infrastructure Organisation (GLIO) Coverage of core infrastructure companies displays a rolling one-year performance (August to August) at 1.3 percent, with the Telecom Infrastructure (8.2 percent) and Electric Utilities (4.6 percent) sectors leading the way for the same period.

If you have noticed a recent uptick in cyberattacks targeting infrastructure and government facilities, you are not alone. Aside from using more sophisticated capabilities, the attacks are coming at us with an alarming frequency. Now, according to a new study by IBM’s X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team, destructive attacks devised with an intent to wipe data and shut down critical systems have increased by a whopping 200 percent over the past six months.

Global Listed Infrastructure: Playing Offense with Defensive Assets was published in May by the Brookfield Public Securities Group. The full article, footnotes and disclosures are available at https://publicsecurities.brookfield.com/news-and-insights Infrastructure assets, the backbone of the modern economy, provide essential services for everyday life. They facilitate the flow of electrons on a wire, hydrocarbons through a pipeline, cars on a toll road and data transmitted among cellular towers, along with many other important functions.

This is the first of a two-part series on sustainability metrics for infrastructure investors. Guggenheim Investments, in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, commissioned Stanford’s Global Projects Center for the report used in this series, State of the Practice: Sustainability Standards for Infrastructure Investors. The first article includes a review of the tools available to institutional investors and their managers, and examines their potential to promote sustainable infrastructure projects for the industry. The second article will be featured next month and will focus on the challenges facing widespread adoption of investor sustainability metrics in infrastructure, and a look ahead at potential opportunities for change. The complete 96-page report is available at www.guggenheiminvestments.com/Standards