On the West Coast waterfront: Big ships and diesel in the salt air mean rising property values, but keep an eye on the Panama Canal When many investors think of "institutional property," visions arise of trophy office towers, high-end shopping complexes or internationally recognized destination resorts. But in today's market, add to that list plebeian waterfront properties in a growing number of port cities, including Los Angeles. To read this full article you need to be subscribed to...

The investment world already has gravitated to automated or program trading, and artificial intelligence for portfolio management. Now, robo-advisers are increasingly being deployed for low-cost customer investment advice and management via online services, without human intervention. By 2020, about $2.0 trillion will be under the management of robo-advisers, estimates consulting firm A.T. Kearney in a June report titled Hype vs. Reality: The Coming Waves of "Robo" Adoption. In terms of...

The collectibles market is faddish, sometimes manipulated, illiquid when compared to securities or even real estate, difficult to measure, offers no yield, and poses middleman fees. Not only all that, even success in collectibles brings burdens, such as the need to insure and provide physical security for, say, portable works of valuable art, easily secreted stamps, or rolling automobiles. Yet there is no denying segments of the collectibles market are booming, even as Wall Street takes an...

Hardly a week goes by that one new record or another is not breathlessly announced in the art world, as in late June when it was reported an all-time high had been set at a Sotheby's auction for a cubist painting, daubed by Pablo Picasso in 1909. The tidy sum of $63.7 million was paid for a canvas entitled "Femme Assise" that last traded hands in 1973 for about $500,000, adjusted for inflation. To read this full article you need to be subscribed to Real Assets Adviser

If the outlook for fossil fuels is challenging, then the world of alternative energies is daunting, at least from the investor perspective and in the medium-term. Oil will eventually budge higher and give hope to alternative fuels or conservation technologies, but the days of Goldman Sachs predicting $200 a barrel oil appear over for a lifetime. In some regards, the green movement has met with too much success, and the demand for fossil fuels weakened with each new high-mpg car or...