Shernel Thielman

There is a figure that few people know, but that is remarkably telling for long-term investors in commodities. India currently consumes around ninety kilograms of steel per inhabitant per year. The United States consumes around two hundred and eighty kilograms. The difference between those two numbers, multiplied by more than 1.4 billion Indian inhabitants, gives an impression of the scale of structural steel demand still waiting to be met in the decades ahead. India is not an abstract...

There is a thought experiment that Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, regularly uses to illustrate his approach. Imagine, he says, that at birth you are handed a ticket with twenty boxes on it. Every time you make an investment decision, one box is punched. Once all the boxes have been used, you may never invest again. How carefully would you then weigh each decision? The ticket does not exist in reality. But the logic behind it is powerful. Most investors make...

A shift is underway in how the world's largest and smartest institutional investors deploy their capital. For well over two decades, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies and university endowments have been steadily increasing their allocation to what the financial world calls 'alternative assets': infrastructure, real estate, renewable energy, private equity and private credit. Assets that are not traded on an exchange, but acquired in direct transactions and held for...