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Global investors need to cast their net broadly to capture attractive investment opportunities. For decades, western analysts have believed that the economic potential and perceived advantages of India—such as a free market economy, democratically elected government and western-style legal system—would allow it to become a dominant global economic and political power. This potential has yet to be realized, causing many investors to avoid India.

Resiliency seems to be the most appropriate word to describe financial markets over the past years, and that held true during the last quarter. Global stock markets continued their trek upward, reaching fresh all-time highs almost daily during the third quarter; the MSCI ACWI Index gained 5.31 percent as the coordinated global recovery strengthened and geopolitical risks were shrugged off by investors. Although most major markets experienced fairly strong positive returns, U.S. equities continued to lag behind international markets mainly due to the political environment domestically.

Middle market direct lending is a large and growing component of the private debt market. The increasing importance of private capital to finance small to medium-sized businesses, coupled with investors’ interest in the asset class contribute to dynamics that set the stage for continued growth. One reason for investing in middle market direct loans is that they have the potential to provide investors with attractive risk adjusted returns, low volatility, and a hedge against rising interest rates.

Investors are adding a gender lens strategy to their overall investment approach for several reasons. They may view it as a way to leverage market systems to support progress towards gender equality. They may regard the addition of gender related variables to their investment process as a way to identify potential areas of opportunity while seeking investment alpha, sustainable growth and lower risk.

Collecting art can be a gratifying experience that can take you into an exclusive world of auction houses, galleries and artists’ studios. There’s a lot to learn in the early days of collecting, and most collectors start small. But if you want to elevate your art buying to collecting, it’s necessary to make a mental shift, including seeing how art should fit into your investment portfolio. Being guided by your heart (and your eye) is important, but making the best financial decisions requires you to also think with your head.

Investors are looking at art for more than their aesthetic qualities. It can also serve as an important portfolio diversifier beyond traditional asset classes like stocks, bonds, and cash.

Financial reports and other real-time operational data are often lagging indicators of performance. These metrics, although perhaps lacking precision, may have been sufficiently effective in the past; however, they are less so now because they lag the current cadence of information dissemination and business volatility today. The challenge for many finance functions is to try to keep pace with all the modern sources of insight and analysis that internal and external stakeholders are receiving.

The private equity secondary market has become a very mature marketplace with billions of dollars sloshing around in it. Secondary interests in well-known firms are very efficiently priced, often at par or just below par. Furthermore, leverage is being used by secondary firms to nudge their internal pricing models to predict something better than a public equity return. While there are some niche secondary strategies that can deliver outstanding returns in this marketplace, a big Wall Street secondary fund is not likely one of them.