Financial assets include things like stocks, bonds and cash. Real assets include things like real estate, infrastructure and commodities. Financial assets offer the advantage of convenience, liquidity, and efficiency whereas real assets are safer in that they do not rely on a public marketplace to derive value for the owner while also being more inflation and " black-swan event" resistant.

Retirement pensions & endowment funds - which have the mandate of generating highly reliable and regular income for distribution - are no longer able to achieve their investing goals by focusing solely on bonds (LQD, VCLT, IEF) after a multi-decade-long decline in interest rates and are instead looking to real assets to meet their needs. Already, trillions of dollars have flown to real assets and the trend appears to be just getting started.