One common area of concern among financial advisers is attracting and retaining female clients. Some advisers are doing a great job serving female clients, while many are struggling to connect.

Just when you think that Ed Keon is a devout member of the Church of Real Assets, he says something that many true believers would consider grounds for excommunication.

First, the self-described “quant” says there is nothing investment managers of his ilk more strongly believe in than the power of diversification. A portfolio rich in variety can reduce the volatility without necessarily harming expected returns, he says, and real assets is an essential tool of diversification.

When executives with SL Green Realty Corp. forked out $2.6 billion for 11 Madison Ave. in Manhattan, the deal was registered as the second most expensive U.S. office building ever purchased. The REIT’s executives, already the Big Apple’s largest commercial property owners, might have chosen to celebrate with a meal from famed restaurant Eleven Madison Park, located on the building’s ground floor.

Own shares in any smart-grid tech companies? If not, the time to stock up might be now.

Thanks to a rare showing of bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives on July 20 rolled out a much-anticipated energy reform bill that, if eventually passed, would give tech companies serving the utility industry a huge lift. It would do so by allowing the utilities to recover via rate setting at least some of their investments in cloud-based software.

Given the strategic importance of infrastructure and its impact on quality of life — as well as its high capital cost — the provision of infrastructure has traditionally been a government responsibility. However, the budget constraints confronting many national and local governments today suggest that the financing of infrastructure will increasingly move towards private investment and public-private partnerships, offering increasing opportunities for private investors. As such, infrastructure is gaining broad recognition among investors as a distinctive asset class.

The majority of asset classes found in real asset portfolios generally share similar benefits. Whether it is real estate, timber, infrastructure, commodities, or oil and gas, they all may provide low correlation and inflation/currency hedging. However, it is oil and gas that has benefits worth expounding upon.

In today’s low interest rate environment, many investors have sought alternatives to traditional fixed-income investments in an attempt to generate the yields that bonds have historically provided. A variety of alternatives have been utilized by investors, including private credit funds, energy investments, pipelines, MLPs and, of course, real estate. Triple-net-lease real estate has garnered specific investor interest as investors and registered investment advisers have come to use it as a fixed-income proxy.

At the beginning of the year I had a rosy view of how 2015 would play out:

1. The United States economy would grow close to 3 percent and the unemployment rate would drop below 5 percent.

2. The Standard & Poor’s 500 would rise more than 10 percent by Christmas.

3. With some monetary and fiscal help, Europe and Japan would grow more than 1 percent.

Imagine having to harvest more food in the next 40 years than humanity has harvested during the previous 10,000 years.

Sharpen your knife and fork because that is not just an intellectual phantasm. It is the reality confronting humanity, according to Purdue University researchers. If that isn’t daunting enough on its face, consider accomplishing this herculean task amidst the onslaught of climate change, water shortages, heat waves and the diminishment of arable land.

Like most advisers, you may often find yourself pressed for time, with seemingly not enough hours in the day to effectively run your practice and position your business for growth. On average, advisers report spending just 60 percent of their time in client-facing activities, with the rest divided between administrative activities, investment management, and training/professional development, according to Cerulli Advisor Metrics.

Demographic shifts — the impact of retiring baby boomers and the rise of the millennial generation — will likely have the most significant impact on real estate near- and long-term.

Shoveling trillions of dollars about on Wall Street can be challenging work, requiring endless due diligence and lots of expensive human time and brainpower, if done the old-fashioned way.

Not only that, human beings are slow, requiring precious moments to ponder, while computers — or robots, if you prefer — think instantly, routinely and yet tirelessly, 24/7 while happily ensconced in a closet in Newark.