Joining me on the program today is Dr. Marc Faber who heads up the Gloom, Boom, and Doom report. And, Marc, recently we’ve seen a precipitous fall in gold unlike anything seen in a few years

Some people have spoken of a different Great Rotation – not from bonds to equities, but from defensive to cyclical sectors within the equity market. Now, Brad Sorensen at the Schwab Center for Financial Research says they are moving to a "more cyclical stance."

The rally in the gold market over the last several years has been based on a misunderstanding of the global economy's problems and a misunderstanding of what quantitative easing is.

First, stocks hit new highs on Friday. Gold lost $22 per ounce.

Value stocks have collectively lagged growth stocks by a decent margin over the past five years, leading many to question whether value approaches still work. In a piece written for Institutional Investor, however, Joseph G. Paul and Kevin Simms of Alliance Bernstein say the discipline is alive and well.

Hedge fund guru Ray Dalio says cash and bonds are both “terrible” investments right now. Dalio tells CNBC that with interest rates kept artificially low by the Federal Reserve, investors have been reaching for return in other areas, driving asset prices up. He also says “there’s the beginning of a leveraging process” going on. Those factors are good for assets in the near term, Dalio says. “I think that assets will continue to appreciate, but there’ll also be a tightening ahead,”

First, stocks hit new highs on Friday. Gold lost $22 per ounce.

Most people in India are convinced that real estate is a great asset. More caution is in order. Real estate investment is not a guarantee of profit. It is hard to be diversified, and illiquidity hampers portfolio structuring. Most important, the outlook for supply over the medium term implies that there is no great upside.

Market signals about the relative value of available materials are paramount for widely dispersed people to make rational decisions. Such was the solution to the “knowledge problem” elaborated by F. A. Hayek. A topical example of Hayek’s theory in practice is the decade-long adjustment in the prices of oil and products refined from petroleum. Oil is generally considered to be a fungible global commodity, and one frequently hears reference to global oil prices as reflecting global supply and demand. But a combination of factors over the past decade has substantively reduced the fungibility of this once-standard product.

Is the gold rush over? Or is this just one last great buying opportunity?

The stock markets are shooting skyward and bond prices remain lofty. It’s enough to put investors in a cheery mood as we approach the summer holidays.

Fans of precious metals have been getting creamed lately. Thanks to declining volatility and a growing sense that real interest rates are on the rise, gold and silver have been getting taken to the woodshed.

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

Bruce Bartlett recently lamented in The New York Times that given the current state of economic affairs we need more Keynesian medicine to fix the US economy. According to Bartlett, the core insight of Keynesian economics is that there are very special economic circumstances in which the general rules of economics don’t apply and are in fact counterproductive.

The Warren Buffett quote that comes to mind: "We don't have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest."

In an age of economic policy activism, including widespread quantitative easing and associated purchases of bonds and other assets, it is perhaps easy to forget that foreign exchange intervention has always been and remains an important economic policy tool.

“The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then to settle down to work with it for a good long time.”

Why instilling admiration for hard work rather than raw talent is the key to fostering a well-adjusted mind.

Here is a curated list of multi-disciplinary books that can help fill your brain and a few that might even help you unwind.

Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to.

The tangled web of international organizations that constitutes global governance has become so remote and ineffective that few count on it to deliver results anymore. Now, after decades of turf wars and self-marginalization, international organizations must rally around an increasingly pressing global priority: sustainable urbanization.

In April 2010, the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook offered an optimistic assessment of the global economy, describing a multi-speed recovery strong enough to support roughly 4.5% annual GDP growth for the foreseeable future – a higher pace than during the bubble years of 2000-2007. But, since then, the IMF has steadily pared its economic projections.

Children are born with an innate number sense — the ability to discriminate quickly between different amounts or numbers of objects, even without counting. And research has shown that children who have a more acute number sense — or Approximate Number System (ANS) — are also better at mathematics.

Is the coming financial collapse going to be inflationary or deflationary?

First, deeply embedded trends demonstrate that, while the European Union is risky in the short term, it will be strong in the medium and long terms. The EU has a powerful logic and purpose in the twenty-first century.

Everyone likes money. Ask people who say they don’t care about money if they’ve ever turned down a raise. Wait for the awkward pause.

America is a rapidly graying society. This demographic trend has been underway for a while — and anticipated for a long while — yet some of its implications are just now coming into focus. Most notably, the aging of America will almost certainly trigger a retirement crisis, with elderly boomers competing for limited financial and medical resources — and working longer just to stay afloat.

Can people be taught to act more altruistically? Newly published research, measuring both brain activity and behavior, suggests the answer just may be yes.

Last week when I arrived to Bangladesh, the immigration officials there were positively ecstatic to see a foreign tourist entering the country.

A psychological bias that illuminates how we negotiate, predict our emotions, agree a price and much more...

About 40 years ago, researchers first began to suspect that we have neurons in our brains called "place cells."

Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, has long intrigued scientists because it is the only other place besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface.

The recent collapse of a garment factory building in Bangladesh, resulting in the death, at latest count, of more than 1,100 workers who were employed there, has led to international outrage not only against the building’s owner but also against the various retailers in the United States and Europe, many of them prominent, that have sold clothing produced in that building. It is demanded that they assume responsibility for working conditions in the factories that supply them and not deal with factories that do not provide safe and humane conditions and pay fair wages.

Investing in a bank used to seem like such a great idea…But then came the crises, the scandals, the closures, not to mention the government bailouts.

Grant thinks the Fed minutes today which turned the stock market lower contained zero pieces of useful information.

The recent controversy over errors in a 2010 paper by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff is a sad commentary on the demands of the 24/7 news cycle and the politically toxic atmosphere surrounding fiscal policy in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

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.

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".

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