Chris Rawley is the founder and CEO of agriculture finance platform Harvest Returns. Their platform allows investors to buy fractional shares of farmland (and timberland) in the U.S. (and abroad), as well as crowdsourced investment in grass-fed livestock and other agribusiness ventures, such as vertical farming and (eventually) aquaculture--and provides agriculture entrepreneurs access to a streamlined, flexible source of capital. This summer, Harvest Returns reached $5 million in global private...
Dec 23, 2020•27 min
Real estate developer and investor Edward Mermelstein has been a dealmaker in New York City luxury real estate for several decades, and a leading expert in closing complex deals and winning unique legal cases. Having been named one of the 10 most influential figures in New York City real estate, today he is the founder and CEO of One & Only Holdings, a company that caters to the real estate investment needs of high-net-worth individuals. In this episode, Mermelstein talks about how covid-19 ...
Dec 22, 2020•38 min
AltoIRA is an investment "platform-of-platforms" that allows holders of individual retirement accounts to use their IRA funds to invest in startups and other private companies, real estate, crypto assets and more. We spoke with CEO and Founder Eric Satz on the quandaries of retail investors accessing private market investments, the future of real assets investing, whether there's any asset that can't (or won't) be fractionalized, and, more philosophically, what the emergence of alternative retir...
Dec 18, 2020•41 min
2020 looked nothing like anyone expected. Among the many who’ve had a difficult job of navigating this environment are investors and risk managers, who have traditionally relied on historical data to backtest trade strategies and assess risk exposures for current and future events. This has been a tough job in a year when so much of what happened had no precedent. This week's guest Jeremy Sosabowski, a former Cambridge physicist turned fintech entrepreneur, has developed market forecasting analy...
Dec 16, 2020•24 min
An Icelandic startup, IceWind, has an ingenuous approach to industrial materials and design that allows a vertical axis wind turbine to provide distributed energy in extreme climates, such as the Arctic. Newly launched for residential and commercial customers in the state of Texas, the company is also finding an interested client base in foreign governments and military customers--specifically, the U.S. Air Force. We talked to Robert Gerber, who spent over a decade with the U.S. State Department...
Dec 14, 2020•34 min
This episode features Vincent Zurzolo, co-owner of New York's Metropolis Collectibles, the world's largest vintage comic book dealership, and ComicConnect.com, the largest online vintage comic auction house. He and his partner, Stephen Fishler, hold five Guinness World Records for the most expensive comics and related collectibles ever sold. We spoke with him about comics as a durable store of value, as an emerging (and increasingly global) alternative investment class, fractionalization of coll...
Dec 11, 2020•47 min
Geospatial technologies, or earth mapping capabilities, have long been in use in military intelligence and defense. Today, they’re being deployed commercially and likely to have transformational impacts in the era of Industry 4.0, including agriculture, defense, transportation, health care, financial services, and even real estate. St. Louis has long been home to the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s Western outpost—which has $1.75 billion in a new and improved agency HQ in St Louis. And the...
Dec 09, 2020•38 min
Foreign Minister Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson speaks about the imperative for "building back better" through global cooperation in the post-covid world, and offers Iceland's experience as a pioneer in renewable geothermal technology, R&D, sustainable fishing and ocean stewardship practices, and gender equality. He also shares Iceland's view on Arctic policy as the country continues its chairmanship of the Arctic Council through 2021, and how he hopes to continue Iceland's productive bilateral rel...
Nov 30, 2020•40 min
A highly successful secondary offering earlier this fall by Icelandair, a rapidly growing sustainable corporate bond market, a promising pipeline for Icelandic growth companies coming to market, the emergence of First North as a public market alternative to VC, and increasing interest from retail and institutional investors, all point to possible tailwinds for the Icelandic listed market. In connection with the upcoming virtual investment expo " How Do I Invest in Iceland ?" produced by Promote ...
Nov 27, 2020•32 min
Iceland notches consistently high ratings on global business and societal indexes, and measures of competitiveness, education, human development, equality and peace. And now, you can add government tax incentives to that list. Ahead of the upcoming virtual investment expo " How Do I Invest in Iceland ?" we talked to Haraldur Ingi Birgisson, Tax & Legal Leader at Deloitte Iceland, on how the country integrates Scandinavian-style social welfare and living standards with a competitive environme...
Nov 26, 2020•23 min
When this year’s covid-related social and economic disruptions put a stop to venture capital roadshows, one Israeli investment firm knew exactly what to do. They disrupted the venture capital roadshow itself. The resulting platform, Investination—a brainchild of Israeli-American real estate and technology investment firm Besadno Group—has emerged this year as a kind of “virtual roadshow” for Israeli startups in proptech (commercial real estate technology), contech (construction technology), agte...
Nov 24, 2020•28 min
John Ellis has been in around the news business (and the American political establishment) for most of his adult life, working for NBC News, the Boston Global, CNBC, Fox News Elections and Business News and Newscorp. He also served as a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and was a Senior Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (2002-2004), where he was awarded the Outstanding Civilian Service Award by the U.S. Army for his work on "Future Threats." Today he is the pu...
Nov 09, 2020•56 min
Publicly traded net-lease REIT pioneer W.P. Carey pioneered the sale-leaseback for real estate investment 50 years ago in the U.S., and has helped to grow and professionalize the European market in the decades since. We talk to their European head, Christopher Mertlitz, on the investment outlook for sale leasebacks in Europe since the onset of covid, and his firm's approach to identifying "mission-critical" assets across national borders....
Nov 06, 2020•35 min
Investment startup FarmTogether , which has received backing from Franklin Templeton Legg Mason and several venture capital partners, gives accredited investors direct access to fractional ownership in U.S. farmland, a $2.5 trillion asset class traditionally owned by actual farmers or very large institutional investors. In this episode, we talk to founder and CEO Artem Milinchuk, who brings to bear more than a decade of finance experience in food, farmland and agriculture . Prior to founding Far...
Nov 05, 2020•28 min
Bitcoin: Political protest vote, futuristic commodity, arcane fade, environmental conundrum, or genuine portfolio hedge--it's outperformed all other asset classes in 2020 for the year to date. Brian Estes, Chief Investment Officer of Off the Chain Capital , a $40 million long-only, non-leveraged bitcoin hedge fund that has outperformed all other crypto funds, the spot price of bitcoin and the S&P 500 over the past three years, views bitcoin as a combination of many (if not all) of the above:...
Oct 28, 2020•38 min
Dr. Christina Lampe-Önnerud, former Boston-Power CEO, founder and CEO of Cadenza Innovation, is a world-renowned expert on battery architecture and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In March, Investable Universe spoke with Dr. Lampe-Önnerud following her address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (and just prior to global economic lockdowns in response to the covid-19 pandemic) about the global market for EV batteries, how Cadenza Innovation is revolut...
Oct 16, 2020•43 min
In August, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted its first-ever design certification of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) designed by Oregon-based NuScale power. This regulatory milestone--a key safety certification to commercializing and deploying the technology for clean energy production in the U.S. and globally--comes after a rigorous and costly multi-year process that was largely supported by NuScale's corporate backer, Fluor Corporation. We talked with NuScale's co-found...
Oct 02, 2020•28 min
The global farmland market has been valued at $9 trillion, $2.5 trillion of which is situated in the United States. While institutional ownership by pension funds and other long-term investors has been on the rise in recent decades, the majority of U.S. farms are still owned (as has long been the case) by farmers. Will this change as new technologies, global investors, and changing farmer demographics enter the mix? We talk to Jim McCandless, Head of Farmland, Real Estate and Private Markets at ...
Sep 25, 2020•25 min
Nickel--a scarce and environmentally burdensome metal that is needed for EV car batteries-- has become a headline commodity of late. Prices spiked earlier this summer when Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised a "giant" contract to any firm that could mine nickel efficiently and sustainably. His challenge gave weight to more recent market chatter that Tesla might be in talks with Canadian miner Giga Metals to secure a reliable North American source for the nickel it urgently needs. In advance of Tesla's ...
Sep 18, 2020•26 min
In August, HSBC announced a new joint venture with climate impact advisory and "natural capital" investment group Pollination. The two firms will join forces to launch family of funds giving investors opportunities to invest directly in global sustainability initiatives around the original "real assets"--land, air, water and biosphere. On this episode, we talk about the challenge and opportunity of natural capital with Pollination Founding Partner Martijn Wilder, a pioneer in global climate law,...
Sep 10, 2020•28 min
A bold new fin-tech disruptor, London-based Fasset, says fractional ownership and tokenization of infrastructure assets like bridges, roads, and energy assets could kickstart sustainable infrastructure growth in developing economies, which will need to invest some $2 trillion per year over the next 15 years just to keep pace with projected GDP growth....
Sep 02, 2020•35 min•Season 2Ep. 3
U.S. farmland investment has historically yielded impressive returns and been a reliable portfolio diversifier . But it’s been prohibitively expensive and for all but institutional investors to access. A new venture capital-funded platform, AcreTrader , hopes to change that dynamic, by making farm investment more broadly accessible to investors through fractional ownership. The firm’s founder and CEO, Carter Malloy, talks to Investable Universe about how new funding mechanisms can enhance U.S. f...
Jan 31, 2020•33 min•Season 2Ep. 1
For the past decade, Solidia Technologies, a New Jersey-based, VC-funded cement and concrete technology company, has been hard at work addressing construction’s shoddy environmental record by looking deeper at the industry’s global resource footprint. CEO Tom Schuler speaks with the podcast on why rethinking water and energy consumption is just as critical to the industry's future as are CO2 considerations, as well as the firm's international expansion.
Dec 20, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Joe Madden, CEO of San Francisco-based commodity technology firm XCHG, says metadata about the source and characteristics of commodities like natural gas may be just as valuable--and tradable--to downstream clients and investors as the actual commodities are today.
Dec 13, 2019•31 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Oil prices normalized rapidly after last month's drone attack on Saudi oil facilities...but the geopolitical outlook remains dicey. Commodity Research Group oil analyst Andy Lebow offers insights on whether low oil prices will last in a time of Middle East wild cards.
Oct 18, 2019•27 min
Lower historical correlations with other commodities, as well as stocks and bonds, make grains a compelling portfolio stabilizer. We talked to Sal Gilbertie of Teucrium Trading LLC, the firm that brought single-commodity agricultural ETFs to the floor of the NYSE, on why not even the trade war can touch the case for grains/
Sep 27, 2019•21 min
Technology has made its way into the multi-trillion dollar commercial real estate market, and venture capital investors have taken notice. Here to discuss trends in prop tech funding is Ash Zandieh, chief intelligence office of CRETech in New York City.
Aug 27, 2019•11 min
Summer 2019 has been a rough go in the always-volatile market for natural gas, with lower price lows and record market shorts.. But we're going long into the weekend with avowed nat-gas bull John Woods, who joins the podcast to explain why he thinks that prices have found a floor.
Aug 23, 2019•10 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Evidence of U.S. /China trade tensions is materializing across currency markets: "safe haven" currencies as well as more volatile "commodity currencies" viewed as proxies for China demand. Here to talk about "elevated risk across all time zones" is Crosscurrents' Investment Advisory President Keith Raphael.
Aug 22, 2019•12 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Ed Meir of Commodity Research Group and INTL FC Stone speaks to Investable Universe about the global market for industrial and precious metals. We talk the current weakness in iron ore, the China outlook, why nickel is "doing its own thing," and hear Ed's fascinating take on what might be ahead for gold and silver prices.
Aug 21, 2019•17 min•Season 1Ep. 1
