From Paris, London to Tokyo, this is where the world's super rich live

Business opportunities, lifestyle desires, hospitals and transportation infrastructure are all factors that draw the super-rich to splash out on homes in large cities.

Business Standard : With their private jets and multiple houses, the world’s mega-rich are the ultimate globetrotters.

Yet about half of this elite population have their main residences within a group of just 10 cities, according to Knight Frank’s 2019 Wealth Report, which lists London, Tokyo and Singapore as home to the most people worth of at least $30 million. Although the US is the world’s largest economy, New York is its only city in the real estate brokerage’s top 10.

The data highlight the concentration of the ultra-wealthy living in the biggest metropolises. Business opportunities, lifestyle desires, hospitals and transportation infrastructure are all factors that draw the super-rich to splash out on homes in large cities. That’s especially true with London -- the UK’s political and financial center, and the world’s top wealth hub -- where foreign property buyers have faced criticism for pushing up prices. London’s richest include members of the billionaire Rausing family, who own packaging company Tetra Laval, and Chelsea neighborhood landowner Charles Cadogan.

“London has a very unique proposition,” said Liam Bailey, Knight Frank’s global head of residential research. “There’s no other city that compares as a global hub for so many different sectors."

The world had almost 200,000 ultra-high-net worth individuals last year, according to the broker’s wealth study, with more than two-thirds of them across Asia, Europe and North America. Europe is the biggest regional center for this population globally, while the surge among Asian economies means the world will have more than 20 million people worth at least $1 million for the first time this year.

Whisky, Cars

Asia’s economic growth is boosting luxury investments worldwide. Last year, China and Hong Kong buyers accounted for about a quarter of purchases in London homes worth at least 2 million pounds ($2.6 million), according to Knight Frank, almost doubling from two years earlier. The region’s rich also boosted demand for luxury collectibles, helping push the broker’s Rare Whisky 100 Index up 40 percent last year.

Rarity and provenance also drove sales of art and vintage cars to new highs in 2018. Highlights include the $48 million auction of a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO and the $90.3 million bid for a David Hockney painting, the most paid at auction for a work by a living artist.

“Direct flights between Edinburgh and Beijing point to the growth of whisky as an asset class,” Bailey said in reference to routes introduced last year by China’s Hainan Airlines. “There’s still a desire for wealthy individuals to dedicate part of their portfolios to tangible items.”

Are you a morning lark or night owl? Here's how your body clock works

Genetics can determine your body clock type, but it's also largely influenced by schedule and lifestyle.

Whether you’re a morning person or love burning the midnight oil, we’re all controlled by so-called “body clocks.” These body clocks (which regulate your circadian rhythms) are inside almost every cell in the body and control when we feel awake and tired during a 24-hour period. But as it turns out, our latest study found that our body clocks have a much bigger impact on us than we previously realised. In fact, our body clocks actually effect how well a person performs on both mental and physical tasks.

Our circadian rhythms are controlled by the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus, which detects light. When cells in your eyes register that it’s dark outside, they send these signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It then releases the hormone melatonin, which makes you feel tired.

Your chronotype is another factor that determines how your biological clocks affect your daily behaviours. For example early chronotypes (“morning larks”) rise early and are most active in the morning, but feel tired late in the afternoon or early evening. Late chronotypes (“night owls”) are tired during the morning, but feel awake in the evening.

These individuals differences may also be seen in multiple other physiological, behavioural and genetic rhythms that happen over a near 24-hour period. For example, chronotype determines the time melatonin is released. For morning larks, melatonin can rise around 6pm, making them feel tired by 9pm or 10pm. For night owls, melatonin can increase at 10pm/11pm or even later, meaning many aren’t tired until 2am or 3am.

Genetics can determine your body clock type, but it’s also largely influenced by schedule and lifestyle. It also changes over your lifetime. People tend to be larks during the first ten years of their life, then shift towards night owls during adolescence and early twenties. By the time you’re 60, you’ll probably have similar sleeping patterns as when you were ten. However, even with these lifetime changes, the factors that determine your chronotype are unique to every individual.

Peak performance and the body clock

Our study recruited 56 healthy individuals and asked them to perform a series of cognitive tasks (to measure reaction time and their ability to plan and process information), and a physical task to measure their maximum grip strength. The tests were completed at three different times between 8am and 8pm to see how an individual’s performance varied throughout the day. Our results showed peak performance differed significantly between larks and owls.

Larks performed best earlier in the day (8am in cognitive tasks and 2pm in physical tasks), and were 7% to 8% better than night owls at these times. Night owls performed best at 8pm in both cognitive and physical tasks. Grip strength was found to be significantly better during the evening for owls by 3.7% compared to larks.

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Cups of tea, pashmina and momos: Here's how to go touring India on a budget

In the Ladakh region of northern India, the town of Leh is known for its beauty and culture, and for the experience of buying a cashmere scarf.

I told the owner, George Sher Ali, that I’d been in his shop before, several years before, and his ears perked up. “Tell me what you bought,” he said, and reached for a tall stack of old assignment notebooks. “I will tell you exactly when you came in.”

I said I’d been into his art and print shop, L’Araba Fenice, roughly eight years ago on a trip to Leh, a town in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, in the far north of India. I bought two or three postcards, as had a friend who had come with me. He flipped through the pages of a few dog-eared notebooks for several minutes before announcing decisively, “This is you. Five postcards.” And he pointed at a hand-scrawled entry in a ledger dated Sept. 19, 2010. It was eight years ago to the day that I’d visited his store.

Leh (pronounced LAY), once the royal seat of a former Buddhist kingdom, is a place with a seemingly undying memory, ageless and eternal as the mountains that surround it. The Ladakh region, dotted with poplars and dominated by the Himalayas, has changed noticeably over the last decade, welcoming more tourists, restaurants and guesthouses. But it remains a wondrous destination for the adventurous traveler, full of captivating scenery, generous and friendly people, and accessible monasteries and holy places nearby. And it doesn’t hurt that it can all be done fairly inexpensively.

A couple of planning tips: You’ll probably want to arrive by plane. The flight to Leh’s Kushok Bakula Rimpochee Airport from New Delhi is about an hour, compared to a 25-hour drive. Flights, fortunately, can be cheap. I bought a one-way ticket directly through Air India for about 2,800 Indian rupees, or less than $40. Because of the unpredictable mountain climate at such high altitude (Leh is at around 11,500 feet), flights arrive and depart in the morning. Don’t plan to hop an evening flight.

After arriving in Delhi, I spent a couple of days sightseeing and getting used to the time change before heading up to Leh early one morning. My trip was part of a longer journey to India, to places that will be featured in future columns. You can expect a good deal of bureaucracy when it comes to travel in this country. Have copies of your itinerary printed out, and a copy of the credit card with which you made a given ticket purchase, or the card itself.

Despite the territorial jockeying between China, Pakistan and India over the disputed Kashmir region, you won’t need any kind of special visa or permit to visit Leh, or sites on the Srinagar-Leh Highway that runs west from town — your Indian visa will do. But if you want to go to certain areas like the Nubra Valley, north of Leh, you’ll need a special Inner Line Permit. The price depends on the length of the permit, but will run in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 rupees.

Friends I’d met during my previous trip to Leh — Tundup, a native of the area, and Sina, a Swiss national who visits frequently — picked me up at the airport and dropped me at my lodgings, the Hotel Spic-n-Span on Old Leh Road (double rooms cost around $45 to $60 per night online). There are hundreds of hotels and guesthouses in Leh, at every price point, but I’d recommend staying within walking distance of the Main Bazaar, the hub of shopping and dining activity in town.... Read More

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