With the possible exception of Warren Buffett, no investor today commands more respect than Baupost Group’s Seth Klarman. Since founding his investment partnership in 1983, Klarman has not only produced unrivaled returns (in excess of 20% per year), but he has also from time to time offered wise and timeless commentary on markets and the craft of investing.

Bill Gross did not see the S&P 500 going up 15% in 2013, never mind by the middle of May.

Every first quarter of the year, the Spanish firm Bestinver Asset Management holds its annual meeting with investors. This year, the meeting had to be postponed until 16 April (from 4 March) because of administrative problems with the venue where it was originally scheduled to be held. The event is a small-scale replica of the Berkshire Hathaway meeting, but it is large enough to fill a 3,000 seat theater in IFEMA, Madrid’s main convention center, and includes an unlimited Q&A section.

I met Josh the first time in 2006, at the value investment seminar I attend each year in Italy. In that year Josh was finishing up his MBA at Columbia University specialising in value investing.

Predicting the direction of the major indexes on a day-to-day basis is an impossible feat. Attempting to play the market’s movements by the hour or minute will cause you to go insane (and lose all of your money in the process).

Mason Hawkins and Staley Cates of Southeastern Asset Management [VII, August 31, 2012] in their latest fund quarterly report describe their approach to activism – on display recently with respect to Dell and Chesapeake Energy – and describe how their fund holdings have evolved as “stock prices increased faster than values” in recent months.

Warren Buffett in this Fortune essay explains why he believes women are key to America’s ongoing prosperity.

Do you see what’s happening here? This market is in overdrive. The melt-up has been relentless, with the broad market gaining more than 1% yesterday. Nearly 200 domestically traded stocks finished the day up 5% or more.

This month, an independent review panel is expected to release its findings regarding the World Bank’s Doing Business report. Speculation abounds that the panel might recommend outsourcing Doing Business, removing its rankings of countries for the ease of doing business in them, or even eliminating the report altogether.

The US is moving to broaden its 'blockade' efforts of Iran to the movement of pure gold into the Islamic Republic. The US-led embargo of Iranian crude succeeded in slowing the flow of petrodollars into the nation but as Foreign Affairs committee chairman Edward Cohen remarked, there is "no question that there is gold going from Turkey to Iran."

Professional and individual investors have long had a hard time beating the broader market. And, says Mark Hulbert, the rise of computer trading programs may be making it harder than ever.

The Value Investing Congress just concluded in Las Vegas where approximately 20 speakers gave their pitches for their favourite stocks. I always find this conference a useful source of ideas to take a further look at. Some of the speakers have incredible track records and their analysis is very robust. The one aspect, however, that really caught my eye was not a stock pick.

Nassim Taleb argues markets need ‘stressors’ to prevent catastrophic events

Tom Russo is a partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner and has managed to beat the S&P 500 index by 4.7 percentage points annually between 1984 and 2011.

Most people go though life not really getting any smarter. Why? They simply won’t do the work required.

It seems the S&P 500's recent strength is somehow comforted by the fact that the USD is riding high on its cleanest dirty shirt meme at 34 month highs but unfortunately for the Chinese (and their practical peg to the USD), things are a little less fun than in the old mercantilist manipulation days. The implicit benefit that dollar flows appear to be getting (via the wealth effect in the US stock market) is not there in China (lower equity ownership); in fact, the rising Yuan is drastically hurting them as despite export orders remaining in growth mode, the China Daily reports that "most exporters in the delta region have told us that the rising yuan value has led to a big profit decline."

Warren Buffett is a businessman and philanthropist. As Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Mr. Buffett has invested in a broad range of companies from See's Candies to Fruit of the Loom.

When volatility prevails in the gold market, I love seeing so many different opinions because it promotes critical thinking and healthy markets. But because gold is unlike any other commodity, many perspectives can be extreme, such as “golden freudes” who take pleasure in gold bugs’ pain.

How many of us would like to walk into a shopping mall holding several grams of gold in the pocket to buy a packet of soap or other daily necessities? This is quite possible if paper currency loses its significance or value.

Charlie Munger, the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), (BRK.B), is on the short list of the three or four investors that have had the greatest influence on my own individual approach to stock selection. Having his read the biography of his life titled Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger, I have great respect for him as a man given that he had to endure the death of a son, a divorce, and near bankruptcy all within a fairly short sequence of his young adult life. When he has a viewpoint on something, it usually pays to listen up.

Over the weekend I read through Ray Dalio’s principles, which is basically a guide to how to be happy and get things done. Ironically, the 123 page document written by one of the world’s best investors and founder of the All Weather Fund, doesn’t directly talk about investing at all. As one might imagine however, many of the principles outlined in the document are as relevant to successful investing as they are to success in your personal and professional life.

I just wrote this post on my investment process and the idea of using screens. I found it interesting that Buffett doesn't even consider screens as a tool. I think most of the reason is that he doesn't use technology much, but other reasons include the sheer size of his investment portfolio and the fact that since the 1980s he has become much more of a business investor interested in the qualitative aspects of a business. He is much more interested in moats, management and competitive advantages than he is about P/E or P/B ratios.

Erasing Friday's gains (and the well-documented VIX-driven melt-up into the close), S&P 500 futures have opened down 4.5 points (against JPY-carry for now), Treasuries are indicated 4-5bps higher in yield, and Gold is opening down 0.4%. Not in itself a large move but perhaps indicative of some concerns that Hilsenrath is on to something and the punchbowl is being ever so gradually pulled away (though, we suspect it is only a matter of time before this article is spun in a bullish light, suggesting that the Fed still does not have a firm timeline in mind, which by implication is bullish - no news is good news - and much more jawboning has to come before the real tapering talk begins). In the meantime, we are sure the clarion call to Buy-The-Feding-Dip will be heard and in the interest of balance, we offer some insight into 'valuations'.

With NYSE margin debt at extremes once again, complacency at all-time highs, valuations (across equity and credit) frothy, and the cacophony of bullish consensus momentum chasers, it seems the anti-thesis of FDR's speech appears quite appropriate...

As markets expected, the ECB has slashed its benchmark interest rate to a record low of 0.5 percent. What are the near-term effects? Amid a temporary weak patch in the global economy, the positive environment for equities remains intact.

Iron Man 3 has passed the $1bn mark at the global box office, less than four weeks after it first hit cinemas.

What's the most difficult job in marketing? Change. And J.C. Penney is the latest example of how hard that is. In the year since now-departed Ron Johnson introduced his new strategy for the brand, sales were down 25%, the stock was down 66% and the company has lost $985 million.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker warned of the risks of an asset bubble forming given the incredible amount of liquidity the Bernanke Fed has injected into the market, even though he said banks are substantially stronger than before the crisis on Wednesday. Volcker also indicated that in the U.S. government makes up about 35% of GDP and that the financing of the residential mortgage market by the state has led to a dysfunctional financial system.

The brouhaha over Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s article “Growth in a Time of Debt” may be the most conspicuous and incendiary scholarly controversy since 1974, when two earlier economists, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, published a notorious book, Time on the Cross, defending the efficiency of American plantation slavery.

If we want to understand what drove the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to terrorism, the answer almost certainly does not lie in Dagestan, where the brothers lived before moving to the United States, or in the two wars fought in Chechnya in the last 20 years. Instead, a key to the Tsarnaevs’ behavior may perhaps be found in developments in England 500 years ago.

“Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987.

“Building a new and livable world will necessitate thousands of little changes.”

“Imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time.”

The pre-societal, animal model of conflict resolution is simple, brutal, and effective. Leaving aside political gambles, moral considerations, and the like, the strong are more willing to fight for their self-interest, while the weak find it more advantageous not to assert themselves. Extrapolated to a fairly simple conflict of interest — wealth redistribution — do modern humans operate under the same logic?

Central Park almost didn’t exist. When it was first proposed, no comparable urban green space could be found in the whole of the United States—and it seemed unlikely that one would arise on land that could be put to other, more profitable use – especially with New York real estate values on a steady rise. But on May 5, 1851, Mayor Ambrose Kingsland proposed that a large public park might be just the thing for the growing city. Not only could it have a salutary impact, but it would allow Europeans to see that Americans could, too, be cultured and refined. Their Hyde Parks and Tuileries Gardens had nothing on us.

There seems to be only one kind of loan that bankers want to make—SBA loans. SBA stands for Small Business Administration, a federal agency that guarantees certain loans made by banks that operate within its guidelines.

Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio are two of the most well-known, successful investors in the world. And The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig says they have at least one key trait in common: They are open to criticism and self-doubt.

While not written specifically for investment managers, the subject matter of this McKinsey Quarterly article – building an effective organizational risk “culture” – is nonetheless quite relevant to them.

President Obama said the conduct involving the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny was "inexcusable" and that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller is out

Raico grew up in the Bronx, but in contrast with the leftist views common in his family’s apartment building and neighborhood, he acquired from an early age a sympathetic grasp of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. In high school, he joined Youth for Taft, where he encountered George Reisman. While still in high school, Raico and Reisman became interested in Mises, and Raico describes their hilarious attempt to meet Mises, in the guise of door-to-door salesmen for The Freeman.

Today, roughly one-quarter of the world’s population lives in conflict-affected and fragile states. Despite vast sums of money spent aiding such states over the last 50 years, armed conflict and violence continue to blight the lives of millions of people around the world. International and national partners must radically change the way they engage such states.

The Bank of England has upgraded its economic growth forecast. BBC reports. The perennially gloomy Sir Mervyn King says the Bank now expects GDP growth of 0.5% during the current quarter. This flies in the face of the current vogue for seeing the UK economy as a basket case, limping from one lacklustre economic quarter to the next as Cherry Reynard reports

“Maybe you have to believe in the value of everything to believe in the value of anything.”

“I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.”

In any conversation, organizational or otherwise, people tend to overuse one particular rhetorical tool at the expense of all the others. People’s default mode of communication tends to be advocacy— argumentation in favor or their own conclusions and theories, statements about the truth of their own point of view. To create the kind of strategy dialogue we wanted at P&G, people had to shift from that approach to a very different one.

Since before the tech bust, we’ve been suggesting that while Americans “think” they’re getting richer... they’re actually heading in the other direction. They’re getting poorer.

On Tuesday a group of scientists published a protocol, a set of instructions for running an experiment, which represents the culmination of a year’s discussion on the problems inherent in academic publishing. The protocol is the first in the Registered Replication Reports project. The scheme, led by Alex Holcombe, Bobbie Spellman and Daniel Simons, is far reaching, and requires putting aside egos and working together across universities and research groups to raise the standard of research.

What is science revealing about the nature of the criminal mind? Adrian Raine, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is an expert in the expanding field of “neurocriminology.” He has written The Anatomy of Violence, a sweeping account of crime’s biological roots, including genetics, neuro-anatomy and environmental toxins like lead. He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Almost fifteen years ago, in a book called “Chance, Development, and Aging,” the gerontologists Caleb Finch and Thomas Kirkwood described a truly elegant study of biology: a batch of roundworms, all genetically identical, raised on identical diets of agar. Despite having identical genetics and near-identical environments, some worms lived far longer than others. The lesson? The classical equation of “life = nature + nurture” had left out chance.

I now know why I gained more than 30 pounds in my early 20s: I was lonely. I had left my beloved alma mater upstate for graduate school and a job in the Upper Midwest. I knew no one and felt like a fish out of water.

When we asked Bill Gates to curate a list of his favorite talks, his first response was, “There are too many to pick, really.” Here, he's whittled it down to 13 essentials.

It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.

Microsoft aims to upgrade the software more frequently, about once a year, rather than every two or three years as it’s done in the past, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product plans are private. The company plans to unveil the first of these updates in 2013, one of the people said.

For the first time, scientists have confirmed that the planet Mercury holds at least 100 billion tons of water ice as well as organic material in permanently shadowed craters at its north pole.

Ed Boyden, an engineer turned neuroscientist, makes tools for brain hackers. In his lab at MIT, he's built a robot that can capture individual neurons and uses light potentially to control major diseases -- all in his quest to 'solve the brain'.

In 1870, German chemist Erich von Wolf analyzed the iron content of green vegetables and accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook.

The United Nations Environment Program warns that global emissions of greenhouse gases are opening up a widening gap between reality and climate change goals

Thanks to gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies, the light emitted by a small galaxy 13.3 billion years ago has reached Earth. John Matson reports

In energy matters, what goes around, comes around—but perhaps should go away

An ambitious plan to provide 15% of Europe's power needs from solar plants in North Africa has run into trouble. The Desertec initiative hoped to deliver electricity from a network of renewable energy sources to Europe via cables under the sea.

Bill Gates in His Own Words readers get a glimpse of the visionary Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist's philosophy on business, technology and life via some of his most memorable quotes

A pioneering European space telescope that discovered the first rocky extrasolar planet is on its last legs, Nature has learned.

A cascade of misfolded proteins may trigger Alzheimer's By Carrie Arnold Researchers have untangled some of the neurological events that may ultimately lead to Alzheimer's disease. Two new studies show that a protein implicated in this form of dementia can infect other neurons to spread disease across the brain. These problematic proteins clump together, which can lead to cognitive problems.

A species of giant tortoises from the Galapagos Islands could be brought back from extinction despite the death earlier this year of the famed "Lonesome George," a tourist magnet and conservation icon who was the last of his kind.

On the heels of a Russian drilling effort that reached Lake Vostok, British and American teams also aim to penetrate ancient subglacial lakes By Quirin Schiermeier and Nature magazine

The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil recently scooped up and placed in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.

The system uses a NeuroSky MindWave Mobile EEG headset to record brainwave data, which is then sent to software on either a tablet/smartphone or on a specially designed pyramid-shaped base. The software converts the brainwave data to flight commands, which control the flight of the spherical helicopter,

In a rare direct photo of a world beyond Earth, astronomers have spotted a planet 13 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our own solar system.

Human Shares ove 90 % of their DNA with their primate cousins. The expression or activity patterns of genes differ across species in ways that help explain each species' distinct biolgy and behavior.

The random motion of a hydrogen molecule can drive the oscillation of a much larger structure By John Matson

Halloween is a time for sharing ghost stories and watching spooky movies. But have you ever thought about the science behind some of these uncanny experiences? Haunted houses, for example, take advantage of the way your brain uses sensory information.

Rising seas and severe storms are the most talked-about threats of climate change. But here's another: no more coffee. Because rising temperatures may cripple wild populations of Arabica coffee—the most cultivated species in the world.

The notoriously brittle building material may yet stretch instead of breaking

A specialized parasite fungus can control ants' behavior. But that fungus also faces its own deadly, specialized parasites

For every one unit of energy that is converted into electricity in power plants today, two units of energy are thrown away. This wasted energy is primarily in the form of heat – or thermal energy – and, there is technology available today that can turn this waste into a usable energy stream.

Under Ravi Venkatesan's leadership from 2004 to 2011, Microsoft India's revenues grew fivefold and the country became one of the fastest growing geographies for the software firm.

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”.

Earnings can be misleading, and stock prices are too hyperactive. So what's the best way to measure executive performance?

Even the greatest company can be brought down by poor management. No one can anticipate every contingency, and even the most far sighted can take a false step.

A new American business book causes a stir, even before its publication

The easy gains collected in last year's stock market recovery may be over, predicts one of Wall Street's top analysts.

Some firms are finding that there is money to be made online, after all.

Optimists in the advertising industry have spotted the green shoots of a recovery. But the big agencies are not so sure.

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.