Yes, gold and gold shares will probably flame out in spectacular fashion, but this is closer to 10 years away than one or two years.

Leukemia claims life of Walter Schloss: investments generated 16% annual return over 47-year period

Greece is being forced to do some very drastic things but they are not in control of themselves and they made a terrible mistake, as did other European countries did by going over to the euro, says Donald Trump, Trump Organization chairman/president. Trump says the euro has been a disaster for some countries like Greece and also weighs in on Rick Santorum’s recent popularity, saying he “flunked out of the Senate and now wants to be President.”

Brent and WTI oil futures are rallying strongly in electronic trading Sunday night on reports Iran has stopped exporting crude oil to British and French companies. According to news reports, Iran's oil ministry spokesman said the country will give its crude oil to new customers instead of UK and French companies.

Thank you for having me today; it is a pleasure and an honor to be here. My goal is to shed light on some key economic trends and their potential effects on the financial markets and then briefly discuss how we are positioned in the products I formerly managed.

Following the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, subsequent economic downturn, innumerable investigative journalism pieces about the big banks and investment practices, and finally the rise of the Occupy movement, it’s safe to say that finance and investing have taken a high-profile position in the mind of the public. People who wouldn't know Freddie Mac from a hole in the ground four years ago are now paying attention to the meta-structure of the US economy in an unprecedented fashion.

In order to estimate likely returns and risks in the financial markets, our general approach is to identify a set of historical instances that match current conditions on a broad range of important dimensions (in practice, using an "ensemble approach" that randomizes over scores of subsets of historical data). We then look at various features of that cluster, including the average return that followed over various horizons, the deepest loss over various horizons, and the overall spread of those outcomes.

The value investor should make an investment only after very careful consideration of the value of the stock. This needs time and patient research until the point is reached where the investor is satisfied that the stock is a bargain and the investment should be carried out. Having gone to all this trouble to pick the right value stock, the investor may be tempted to sit back and consider this a job well done. This attitude would be a mistake. Each investment must be monitored regularly to ensure that the reasons why the investment was made are still valid.

John Maynard Keynes should have noticed. His idea was that the feds would run surpluses in the fat years and deficits in the lean years. But it ran onto the jagged shoals of human nature…the same animal spirits that animated the crowds outside our window last night. It doesn’t take much self-discipline to run a deficit or to celebrate Carnival. Running a surplus…or fasting…is another matter. Carnival is easy. Lent is hard.

Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.

Gold prices are up today after the second Greek bailout was agreed upon late last night by member of the Euro zone. Gold was up close to $30 to $1,756.10 this morning.

The momentum investing fad didn’t die with the tech bubble in the 1990s or the credit bubble in the 2000s. Today, investors are even buying and selling dividend-paying stocks on momentum.

“Deficits are always bad,” thunder fiscal hawks. Not so, replies strategic investment analyst H. Wood Brock in an interesting new book, The American Gridlock. A proper assessment, Brock argues, depends on the “composition and quality of total government spending.”

What do Homer’s Odyssey, Boombustology, and “financialese” have to do with wealth management? Quite a lot, it turns out.

The Empire of Debt has only one end-point: a death spiral. It is evil and must be dismantled.

History is replete with the carcasses of failed currencies destroyed through misguided intentional debasement by governments looking for an easy escape from piling up too much debt. James Rickards, author of the recent bestseller Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis, sees history repeating itself today - and warns we are in the escalating stage of a global currency war of the grandest scale.

After getting a sneak peek at Buffett's Annual Letter, I decided to write this essay as it is my humble opinion that Buffett has taken his view of gold to a level that is more sophism and rhetoric than factual while completely disregarding gold's historical role as a medium of exchange.

America lost an investing icon over the weekend; although few individuals outside the small fraternity of Graham and Doddsville are privy to the unique brilliance which Walter Schloss possessed. That fact is almost as sad as his passing.

This week we have a shorter Outside the Box, from my friend David Galland at Casey Research, with an interesting insight into why gold can be considered as a poor investment by some rather influential investors (like Warren Buffett) while others may see it as the core of a diversified portfolio. As usual when I use someone's material for an OTB, I include a link at the end, if you want to look deeper. The rather large team at Casey Research specializes in gold, natural resources, and energy-related investments, for those with such an investing bent.

In Fidelity's star-performing fund manager Anthony Bolton, we have a British investment guru rivalling anything the US can give us. He's up there with the likes of Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch and Benjamin Graham.

Does anyone know what China really wants and in which direction China is going?

The big banks lent the Greeks money. Then, the bankers paid themselves big bonuses, rewards for having booked so much business.

Imagine a region of the world where stocks have had their best January in nearly 15 years; bank shares are up 20%; the rates at which governments borrow money has fallen sharply; investor sentiment is at its best in months.

Walter Schloss, the money manager who earned accolades from Warren Buffett (BRK/A) for the steady returns he achieved by applying lessons learned directly from the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, has died. He was 95.

The British Civil Service is not a body known for radical change; it’s never quite got over having to give up the quill pen and tends to view with suspicion newfangled ideas like computers and women in the workplace. Despite this it’s currently at the heart of a large scale experiment on the use of techniques from behavioral science, aka, “nudge” theory.

We were more than acquaintances. We worked at adjoining desks at Magazine Management Company in 1964-65. Bruce Jay Friedman was the editorial director. They published dozens of men's adventure magazines -- the kind of pulps with covers of eight girls in bikinis with machinguns storming out of black helicopters. I gave him some research materials on the Mafia in Sicily -- Norman Lewis's book, The Honored Society, among other items -- and he wrote a fictional adventure story based on it -- presented as fact in the shamelessly corrupt policy of the company's products. This went through the roof on all the marketing survey categories -- they read it, remembered it, liked it, wanted more of the same.

The European Central Bank bought no government bonds at all last week, halting its controversial purchase program for the first time since it restarted it in early August.

While it has been well-documented by now, that even as the campaign of Mitt Romney continues to be funded exclusively by Wall Street legacy firms, that of Ron Paul is largely in the hands of the US military.

Media of exchange and money are market phenomena. What makes a thing a medium of exchange or money is the conduct of parties to market transactions. An occasion for dealing with monetary problems appears to the authorities in the same way in which they concern themselves with all other objects exchanged, namely, when they are called upon to decide whether or not the failure of one of the parties to an act of exchange to comply with his contractual obligations justifies compulsion on the part of the government apparatus of violent oppression.

In a recent New York Times piece, bestselling textbook author, Harvard professor, and Mitt Romney advisor Greg Mankiw offered four principles of tax reform that are almost universally endorsed by professional economists, even extremely free-market ones.

We have concluded that the value of each unit of any good is equal to its marginal utility at any point in time, and that this value is determined by the relation between the actor's scale of wants and the stock of goods available.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is aiding Greece with a swap of outstanding bonds it is holding, for new Greek bonds, at no loss to the ECB. It is also expected to continue its efforts to shore up the European banking system and credit markets with another very sizable (perhaps 1-trillion-euro) extension of 3-year credits to banks at the end of this month.

Since the fifth review, a number of developments have pointed to a need to revise the DSA. The 2011 outturn was worse than expected, both in terms of growth and the fiscal deficit; the macroeconomic outlook has deteriorated significantly, due to events in Europe; the fiscal outlook has deteriorated due to the economy and due to delays in developing fiscal-structural reforms; and the strategy of the program has been adapted, to place greater emphasis on upfront actions to improve competitiveness (which will change the expected profile of the recovery and have implications for the fiscal accounts). The DSA also must be updated to include the envisaged PSI deal between the IIF-led creditor group and the Greek authorities

The United States is widely recognized as possessing the deepest, most liquid, and most efficient capital markets in the world. America’s financial system supports efficient capital allocation, economic development, and job creation.

Last Sunday, February 12th, was Darwin Day: a celebration of the life and work of Charles Darwin. Yet more than 150 years after the publication of his monumental On the Origin of Species, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection remains controversial outside the sciences, at least in the United States.

Biofuels will not save us from climate change, argues Matt Ridley. Their environmental impact is worse than that of fossil fuels

When underdogs break the rules.

Marquee money management firm says the big country is headed for big trouble

Why everyone overestimates American equality of opportunity.

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This is one of the most famous quotes from Albert Einstein. "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." Similarly, Eugene Wigner said that the unreasonable efficiency of mathematics is "a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Thus we have a problem that may seem too metaphysical to be addressed in a meaningful way: Why do we live in a comprehensible universe with certain rules, which can be efficiently used for predicting our future?

Willpower is the key to much that's good in life. Willpower is what makes us save for the future rather than splurge now. It helps us to keep our heads down, studying and working when we really don't feel like it, to earn that degree or promotion. Willpower allows us to say no to that tempting cigarette, extra dessert, or second glass of whiskey -- and to hop on the treadmill. And, of course, failures of self-control can sabotage all those goals.

Thoughts can flow quickly or slowly. If you start your day with a cup of coffee, and an inbox full of e-mails with only a few minutes to check them, you may find your thoughts racing. But, if you skip your morning coffee and start the day staring at a blank wall, you probably won’t be thinking that fast. “Many aspects of your everyday environment impact the speed of your thinking,” says Emily Pronin, a psychology professor at Princeton University, who cowrote the article with Jesse J. Chandler.

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, “Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit.” I’m surprised I haven’t been buried alive. I have to struggle to keep a path clear between bed and toilet, toilet and kitchen table, table and front door

WHEN China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, visited the White House on Tuesday, President Obama renewed calls for China to play more fairly in the world economy. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. echoed those sentiments, telling Mr. Xi that the two countries could cooperate “only if the game is fair.”

I’ve heard it a few times: Don’t shop when you’re hungry, you’ll spend more and buy unhealthy food! There is more than a grain of truth to this, and plenty of empirical research to back it up. Yet, it is worth asking why this phenomenon occurs in the first place. You probably have an intuitive notion of why, but let’s look at some studies to gain a better understanding of what happens at grocery stores when we’re hungry.

The prisoners’ dilemma is the best known strategy game in social science. The game shows why two entities might not cooperate even when it appears in their best (rational) interest to do so. What is rational for the individual in certain circumstances is not rational for the group — that is, pursuing a strategy that is rational for you leads to a worse outcome.

Let's face it, the dogged Republican quest to find the one "true conservative" is beginning to look more and more like the search for the Holy Grail. It's an article of faith for most Republican stalwarts that there should be some such animal; but, it seems, the voters can't make up their mind just which contender fits that bill of particulars. Mitt's devotion to the ideal scores high in one primary; Santorum's in another; then enter Newt, managing to capture some piece of primary fame and glory. The series of Republican debates has become, in essence, the most entertaining variety show since Ed Sullivan.

The KIPP Academy Middle School in New York City’s South Bronx has 268 students in grades five through eight. Bill answered videotaped questions from students in Ms. Maria Soto’s eighth grade Writing class.

Using lasers to trigger fusion could prove cheaper than other techniques

When Robert Carter looks over the connected world of online communities that many experts call Web 2.0, it is hard for Carter -- the chief information officer and executive vice president of global shipping giant FedEx Corp. -- to curb his enthusiasm. Al Nugent, the chief technology officer for computer giant CA, surveys the same universe and sees similar promise but worries more about the increased risk of an operational meltdown and the rise of new security concerns. Both men spoke at the recent Wharton Technology Conference 2007.

Outsourcing is breaking out of the back office.

Technology firms have left the big corporate R&D laboratory behind, shifting the emphasis from research to development. Does it matter?

Seven years ago, Rajesh Jain ignited a dot-com storm in India when his portal, IndiaWorld, was sold to Sify, an Internet service provider, for $115 million. Today, he is CEO of Netcore, a Linux-based messaging software firm, and also maintains an active blog, emergic.org. Jain met with Knowledge@Wharton at his offices in Mumbai to discuss how mobile phones could hold the key to the Internet's evolution in India and other emerging economies.

Can a concept exist without words to describe it?

If the excitement at New York's NanoBusiness Conference is any guide, future historians will declare early 2003 to be nanotechnology's tipping point, the pivot on which the industry slid from "not quite ready" to "raring to go."

The future generations of nanotechnology will rely on being able to effectively arrange atoms. Molecular manufacturing, and the use of molecular assemblers to hold and position molecules, will be key to the future, controlling how molecules react and allowing scientists to build complex structures with atomically precise control. In this essay, Dr. Drexler discusses the benefits and challenges of future molecular manufacturing.

"The story of Qualcomm's CDMA written by George Gilder".

"Gilder's theory hinges on a broad and quirky worldview. In an era of material abundance, he says, there are two scarcities that will drive the development of technology. One is a physical limit--the speed of light--and the other is a biological limit--the human lifespan."

In an era of unrelenting competition, innovation has become a priority for corporations, institutions and nations. Heightened interest is spurring widespread efforts to analyze what underlies the process and assess how firms and countries are doing, because good measurement is central to effective management. Meet the researchers bent on prying the lid off innovation's black box.

Nicholas Negroponte explains why Wi-Fi "lily pads and frogs" will transform the future of telecom.

In once-booming telecom country, bankruptcies are up, and assets are up for grabs. Level 3's Jim Crowe surveys the wreckage.

MIT s Media Lab founder laments a growing lack of creativity, as seen in bad design and hard-to-use devices

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. A must read for everybody interested in knowing more about where we're headed. Miss it at your own peril. And for all you guys at Dalal Street trading paper, the Capital Markets may just not exist in a few years! It's a nineteen-page article, and we'd recommend that you read every word of it. It may take a few seconds for the page to download, but its well worth the wait. Take our word for it… From one of the most respected technology gurus

An excellent article about the so called tech downturn. The author feels this is merely a pause-to-catch-breath phase and there is lots more to be done. Sure, dotcom valuations have fallen, with even frontrunners like Yahoo! Losing 76 % of its value. Sure, venture capitalists are tightening their purse strings. Sure HTML has reached the limits of it can do, but is giving way to another language XML. But, concludes the article, there's no turning back

"The article visualises the impact of handheld devices on health care industry."

"Quite an interesting description of important inventions in the last two centuries."

"The story of the inventor of the internet."

"When the author was a child, the pendulum swung even slower. It was longer then, too. It was shortened (and therefore quickened) in one of those paradoxical compromises of museum management: People stood mesmerized for so long that they blocked the flow of traffic. This speedup of an icon of slowness is symbolically fitting. The tempo of life has quickened."

A handful of hot new patents that may change the way business and technology get done.

The future of big computing may lie in distributing the work.

Vaccines you eat will make immunization less painful and more accessible worldwide.

New Raman amplifiers are key to building an all-optical Internet.

Ties between the two men go way back. In May 1939, Churchill reviewed Drucker's first major book, The End of Economic Man, for The Times Literary Supplement, praising him as "one of those writers to whom almost anything can be forgiven because he not only has a mind of his own, but has a gift of starting other minds along a stimulating line of thought."

Most people know Peter Drucker through his books and articles. But Drucker was also a great speaker, especially in the classroom, where his students would sit rapt, listening as he pulled facts from his encyclopedic mind and shared insights on countless subjects. This side of the "father of modern management" is captured in The Drucker Lectures, (McGraw-Hill, 2010). Edited by Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute and a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Drucker Lectures features 33 of his most important talks. The earliest was delivered in 1943. The latest were given at Claremont Graduate University in 2003, two years before Drucker died. The excerpt below, on "The Future of the Corporation," comes from one of those final lectures.

It's a good time to be a corporate gadfly.

So many of the problems we face today result from poor decision-making by private corporations. Prominent examples include the Gulf oil spill and the seriously weakened financial sector, which is imperiling the rest of our economy. However, so many who describe themselves as liberals or progressives seek to address such problems with more government regulation and programs instead of by preventing the bad decisions at the source, which is likely to be more efficient from a resource utilization perspective.

This letter to Occidental Petroleum’s board of directors from Ralph Whitworth of Relational Investors (VII, September 30, 2009) and Anne Sheehan of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System outlines why the activist investors are seeking to replace at least four board members: “[T]he board, as currently composed, suffers from entrenchment and ossification, which renders each of its members incapable of functioning as vigorous and independent shareholder representatives.”

Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.

Power in modern society is progressively being diffused, moving away from central government to interest groups, even to single individuals. Society and the body politic in democratic societies are becoming pluralist in new ways. This phenomenon was analysed by management guru and social science professor Peter Drucker in his book The New Age. A clear understanding of this development would help political and social leaders to cope with changing electoral aspirations.

The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management was recognized as an “Excellent Business School” by EDUNIVERSAL, an organization that helps students choose the best business schools worldwide. The Drucker school was honored to be among the 1,000 selected business schools in the world because of its strength in the US and international influence.

Peter Senge (born 1947) studied aerospace engineering at Stanford University before moving into the field of organisational behaviour and becoming director of the Centre for Organisational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is credited with developing the idea of the learning organisation, based on his study of social systems and the relationship of the whole to its constituent parts. A learning organisation, he once said, “is continually expanding its capacity to create its future”.

We live in a world of euphemism. Undertakers have become "morticians," press agents are now "public relations counsellors" and janitors have all been transformed into "superintendents." In every walk of life, plain facts have been wrapped in cloudy camouflage.

The influence the CEO has on people--individually and collectively.

I've read about shamrock organisations, horizontal organisations and federal organisations. I've read about intelligent enterprises and spider-web organisations. The most-quoted management guru Peter Drucker said that managing an information-based organisation is more like conducting a symphony orchestra than running a business on traditional lines. Others have compared it to running a jazz combo, and then there are those who say it's like running a sports team.

The bestselling author answers our readers' questions about business, leadership - and mountain climbing.

Think of them as the "walking dead," a type of customer who currently maintains service with a particular company, but whose next action will most likely be to discontinue that relationship, according to a new study that examines how the customers of a telecommunications firm acquire and discard services over time. The paper -- "Modeling the Evolution of Customers' Service Portfolios," by Wharton marketing professors Peter Fader and Eric Bradlow and a former Wharton PhD student -- focuses in part on whether it is possible to predict future purchasing patterns by looking at past buying behavior.

How CEO George Buckley is managing the yin and yang of discipline and imagination

Some shoppers just can't help themselves and buy mostly on impulse without regard to price. Others are die-hard bargain hunters, who only open their wallets for a discount. Then there are the strategic consumers, who are willing to buy full-price sometimes, but at other times they will wait for a bargain. According to new research by Gérard P. Cachon, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and doctoral student Robert Swinney, it's these customers that retailers need to focus on in order to reap the full benefits of lean retail inventory management and variable pricing.

Few have had as great an impact on the business world as Peter Drucker. So, it is more than fitting to have his work amplified on Branding Strategy Insider during this years Marketers For Charity effort.

Robert Bruner still remembers the first book he read as a manager. It was 1988, and Bruner, now the dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, was an up-and-coming professor, respected for his work in finance. But he'd never managed people before. And when he was charged with overseeing the first year of the school's M.B.A. program, Bruner began to struggle.Under fire, Bruner scrambled for guidance. He found it in Peter Drucker'sThe Effective Executive. In the book, published two decades earlier, the dean of management thinkers—known for his study of GM under Alfred Sloan—offered advice to managers burdened with exactly Bruner's problems.

If you own stock in a company that is ripe for takeover, you should hope the company is not acquired by a private equity firm.

Most people assume that good corporate governance benefits shareholders, and that corruption in a banking system should be rooted out. But just how much benefit does a company really get when it improves its accounting and puts a few outsiders on its board of directors? And when does an anti-corruption crusade start to backfire, causing a chilling effect that denies loans to credit-worthy borrowers? India offers a chance to study both questions, which were the subject of papers presented at a global conference on India's Financial System held in April at Wharton. The conference was organized by Wharton's Financial Institutions Center with the Centre for Analytical Finance at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and the Stockholm-based Swedish Institute for Financial Research.

While a number of Indian IT companies are expanding globally, several major U.S. IT firms are increasing their presence in India. Among them is Adobe Systems, which views India as an important development center and a growing market for its products. In the second of a two-part interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Adobe president and chief operating officer Shantanu Narayen discusses the company's strategy regarding India and global expansion. In the first part of the interview, published in Knowledge@Wharton, he talks about Adobe's product strategy for the emerging trend of rich Internet applications.

A key element of what has been called "web 2.0" -- along with ideas such as user-generated content and social networks -- is the concept of "rich Internet applications," which use the web as a platform for innovative types of online experiences. A new generation of Internet-connected applications is beginning to emerge led by such companies as Adobe Systems. Knowledge@Wharton recently interviewed Adobe president and COO Shantanu Narayen about the company's latest product introductions. In the second part of this interview, published in India Knowledge@Wharton, Narayen talks about the key role that India will play in the company's global growth strategy.

IN the past business in China has been predominantly driven by the all-pervasive guanxi or relationships - be it family ties, friendship, or a set of official favors and reciprocation that keep the wheels turning.

Here comes a truly worthwhile look at leadership, "True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership," by Bill George with Peter Sims.

Alfred A. Marcus, a professor at the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, reviewed detailed performance metrics for the 1,000 largest U.S. corporations, identifiying the 3.2% that have consistently outperformed their industries for a full decade. In his book, Big Winners and Big Losers: The 4 Secrets of Long-term Business Success and Failure (Wharton School Publishing), Marcus explains the strategies these companies followed, how they found opportunities in markets that others didn't see, and how they managed the tension between agility and discipline. Below is an excerpt from Chaper Seven, titled "Focus."

Hedge Fund Tools offers the only reverse bidding platform for hedge fund services. Hedge Fund Tools expert team helps setting up your hedge fund or for jobs.

Knowledge management systems and knowledge management software for business growth & communication

The website of James O’ Loughlin, author of "The Real Warren Buffett".

The General Center for Internet Services Inc. ( GCIS ) is one of Canada's oldest and largest Internet services provider and e-commerce application developer. Originators of the famous Pagina+ (tm) Search Engine Optimization service, GCIS is in business since 1996.