"They could buy oil and gas from international markets, but I think they are looking for a bit more security by becoming equity partners at the producers of these assets," said Mr Regan of Tri-Zen.
A number of exchange-traded funds also own producers of hard assets, including s&p Global Materials (fee, 0.48% a year) and the Van Eck Market Vectors Agribusiness ETF (fee, 0.65%.) These metals and agricultural firms are cheap by historical standards and offer an inflation hedge.
Imagine that all the major commercial producers of this asset are positioning themselves for years of rising prices.
Other large holdings include Norilsk Nickel, the giant metal producer, at 5.2percentt of assets at the end of last year, and Vimpelcom, the mobile phone company, at 4.1percentt.
Also, of course, for new formats to be really useful (and not cause pain for content producers producing many different versions of assets) they need to be adopted by the market - I don't know if MS, and Apple play to support these in their respective browsers (that's ignorance by the way, I simply don't know).
Together the two media behemoths would control a huge portfolio of assets including Warner Bros, producers of the Harry Potter and Batman movies; 21st Century Fox's X-Men Avatarandr; and Time Warner's lucrative cable channels, including HBO, home of Game of Thrones and Fox's FX, Fox News and the Fox broadcast network.
And a generation of producers — whose principal assets were their industry connections and a remarkable degree of personal force — are having to adapt.
Wyser-Pratte has been angling to restructure France's Taittinger family empire, a regular hodgepodge of assets including two hotel chains, a champagne producer and Baccarat crystal.
Other assets, including the country's biggest electricity producer, P.P.C., and the horse-racing company O.D.I.E., are on a list of assets that Greece plans to privatize, in whole or in part, by 2015.
He's still a bull on both stocks, but his first choice at present is Sappi, the world's largest producer of high-end paper for magazines and catalogs, which he says has "a very impressive set of assets".
