Last year, UK companies raised just ￡1.3bn in new equity, net of buy backs and acquisitions. Over the past month, Nat Rothschild and Tony Hayward raised the same amount by selling shares in Vallares, their new investment vehicle. What makes this all the more remarkable is that the company, as the prospectus coyly acknowledges, is a newly formed entity with no operating history, no revenues and no basis on which to evaluate its ability to achieve its objectives.

So what do we learn from this? First, that the world is in the grip of a commodities boom. Vallares intends to make substantial investments in oil and gas. The directors think that the supply of commodities will not rise to meet demand in a globalising world, and that price inflation is a given.

The next message is that if you want to find value in natural resources you have to be willing to fish in murky waters. There are no bargains to be found in transparent markets such as those of the North Sea. Instead, Vallares “aims to generate value for shareholders by focusing on opportunities where there is less visibility on transaction pricing due to a combination of context and geography”. Mr Rothschild showed what this meant last year when another of his vehicles made a large deal with one of the dominant business families in Indonesia, a country long seen as being on the wilder shores of capitalism.