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

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.

IN THE past 35 years, hundreds of millions of Chinese have found productive, if often exhausting, work in the country’s growing cities. This extraordinary mobilisation of labour is the biggest economic event of the past half-century. The world has seen nothing on such scale before. Will it see anything like it again? The answer lies across the Himalayas in India.

Senior government official confirmed the development, explaining that the decision not to consult with RBI was taken to avoid what he described as a "conflict of interest".

As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. In this multiplayer online game played by millions, witch doctors, demon hunters, and other character types duke it out in a war between angels and demons in a dark world called Sanctuary.

Some two years into Egypt’s grass-roots revolution, the country’s economy is in a worrisome downward spiral. A growing number of people, inside and outside of the country, are starting to blame the revolution itself for derailing an economy that was growing, reducing its external-debt burden, and maintaining a comfortable cushion of international reserves.

In 1881, Dakota Territory had never sold a bushel of wheat to anybody outside of Dakota. Six years later, it sold 62 million bushels.

Several of my Harvard University colleagues have recently been casualties in the crossfire between fiscal “austerians” and fiscal stimulators. The economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have received an astounding amount of press attention since it was discovered that they made a spreadsheet error in a 2010 paper that examined the statistical relationship between debt and growth. They quickly conceded their error

History will juge Bill Belichick as one of the greatest coaches ever. Not just in the NFL, where he coaches the New England Patriots, but in all of sports. He’s also incredibly smart.

“Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.”

Individuals who learn two languages at an early age seem to switch back and forth between separate “sound systems” for each language, according to new research conducted at the University of Arizona.

The ability to read well and do maths at an early age has been found by researchers to be a key factor in deciding whether people go on to get a high income job later in their lives.

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman is the latest subject in our Desktop Diaries series, although he has no desk. Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University, won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2002 for his research with the late Amos Tversky on our sometimes irrational intuitions and how they affect decision-making.

Millennials are the “ME ME ME GENERATION,” writes Joel Stein for the cover of Time magazine, which is apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who were the plain old “Me Generation” (one me, no caps) and who created the “Me Decade” in the 1970s, and who coined the phrase, “But enough about me… what do you think about me?” in the 1980s when they were raising the next narcissists, Generation X.

The mind-boggling events of the past month — the Boston Marathon bombings, the fertilizer plant explosion near Waco, a deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh — will undoubtedly leave in their wake a host of survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Many victims will get over the short-term trauma of those events, but others — in the coming weeks and months –will begin experiencing the chronic bad dreams, flashbacks, sleep difficulties, and frightening thoughts that characterize PTSD. Those individuals will likely avoid places, events or objects that remind them of the experience.

The theory of Petrodollar Warfare can be attributed to US analyst and author William R Clarke, and his 2005 book of that title which interpreted the US-UK decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He called this an "oil currency war", but the concept of the petrodollar system and petrodollar recycling dates back to the eve of the first Oil Shock in 1973-1974.

I am often on a panel or at dinner with Barry Ritholtz (The Big Picture), and he will remark, "I am going to have to rethink my position – I agree with John, and that can't be right." While I don't share that bias, I do agree with Barry about his recent take on legislation – which might actually pass – that would deal with too-big-to-fail banks in the US. Barry's latest take on that issue is this week's Outside the Box.

Does thinking too specifically about a bet make you more likely to lose?

One of the primary focuses of "Out of the Box" is on where you might get hurt and, more importantly, seriously hurt. "Preservation of Capital," the first ten rules of my thinking, has reached epic seriousness in a world with interest rates at unsustainable lows and underlying economic fundamentals that cannot support today's yields.

“For three years and more Beltway politics has been all about the deficit. Urgent action was needed to avert crisis. A Grand Bargain absolutely had to be reached. Fix the Debt, now now now!

In an era of payer austerity and funding challenges, more and more biotech entrepreneurs and investors, alike, are realizing the considerable risks associated with simultaneous development of multiple assets and instead opting for a more streamlined approach that has come to be known as “asset-centricity.”

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

A then 34-year-old career con man named David Anthony Whitaker left the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and slid into the backseat of an unmarked government car. He was dressed in traditional prison garb—khaki pants, brown shirt, handcuffs, leg irons. A federal agent sat beside him.

IT IS a lesson of the past five years that benchmarks in unregulated markets can fall victim to the incentives they create. Subprime mortgages bundled into securities often won high scores from ratings agencies that stood to profit in a busy market. The London Interbank Offered Rate, LIBOR, was sometimes underestimated by banks which were cast in a healthier light by lower interest rates. Has something similar been going on in energy?

When Rajat Gupta first joined McKinsey, in 1973, it wasn’t unusual for consultants to make as much as investment bankers. But that began changing in the 1980s, when bankers started to sell an array of new products, like junk bonds, to corporate clients. By the ’90s, Wall Street analysts were pulling in millions each year.

In the drawing rooms of Lahore last week I met old friends who told me that I had become a hate object in the eyes of the ‘liberals’ they knew in India. I took this as a compliment since I know that many of these liberals are crypto-communists in disguise and I despise communists. Just as I despise Nehruvian socialism because I believe that it is entirely because of it that India remains mired in poverty, illiteracy and squalour to this day.

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.

"In his own words, Welch tells how to jolt a business to life."

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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.