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.

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.

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.

A young Houston couple is planning to give away $4 billion—but only to projects that prove they are worth it. Can they redefine the world of philanthropy?

Most people — from young to old and from all ends of the political spectrum — are united by a common bond. The idea that banks are deserving of taxpayer support is viewed as morally repugnant to them. Business owners see bank bailouts as an unfair advantage that is not extended to all businesses. Those typically on the political left see it as support for the establishment, and a slap in the faces of the little people. Those more at home on the political right see it as just another form of welfare: wealth redistribution from the hard working segment of the population to the reckless gambling class of banksters.

As another example of the complex relation of mineral depletion, the economy, and the tendency of grabbing what is left, one way or another, this article by Antonio Turiel sheds plenty of light on the difficulties that the nuclear industry has in obtaining a steady supply of uranium.

The newspapers and TV channels reported the Dow 15,000 story last week as though it were just a stepping stone on the way to 16,000… or 20,000… or 30,000.Heck, the sky’s the limit!

The City of London faces two huge challenges from the European Union. One is what is famously referred to as a Tobin tax which would see a levy on financial transactions not directly in the UK but with huge implications for it. Another is a regulatory move to limit bankers’ bonuses by the increasingly tough EU regulators.

For more than a decade, Asia’s economies have been on the move – and so have its people. The scale of migration from rural to urban areas and across international borders is historically unprecedented, and twenty-first-century Asia is its focal point.

Bill Gates was curious. How many teachers get useful coaching? The answer blew his mind.

Today, Benjamin Graham is known primarily as Warren Buffett’s investing mentor and the author of multiple classics about value investing. Toward the end of his life, in the 1973 edition of “The Intelligent Investor,” Graham wrote, “Ever since 1934 we have argued in our writings for a more intelligent and energetic attitude by stockholders toward their managements”.

[Tepper] said the post showed “when the equity risk premium is high historically, you get better returns after that.” He continued, “So we’re at one of the highest all-time risk premiums in history.”

Previous research has focused on each emotion resulting from specialized and distinct brain circuitry. Psychological scientist Christine Wilson-Mendenhall of Northeastern University and colleagues wanted to investigate the brain regions in common among all the emotions.

The evils of this deluge of paper money are not to be removed until our citizens are generally and radically instructed in their cause and consequences, and silence by their authority the interested clamors and sophistry of speculating, shaving, and banking institutions.

The mystique of the Bermuda Triangle has caught the imagination and interest of generations. In much the same way it has also caught my attention and I feel that now there is a Bermuda Triangle of economics - a space where everything tends to disappear without radar contact, a black hole in which rationality and science is replaced by hope, superstition and nonsense pundits like myself pretending to understand the real drivers of the economy.

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.”

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.

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?

Can a concept exist without words to describe it?

What digital camera makers can learn from George Eastman

With his corporate ties cut, the "Edison of the Net" speaks freely on the challenges facing Sun, the Net, and, of course, Microsoft.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the MIT Media Lab, has long been a seer of digitization and computerization; these days, he is seeing it in countless new devices.

Q&A: MITs Kenneth Keniston says cheap information kiosks are helping India bring computing power to the masses, providing a model for how to bridge the digital divide.

3Coms founder says since so many got burned by tech, people are only slowly returning to embrace its continued promise

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

3Com s founder says since so many got burned by tech, people are only slowly returning to embrace its continued promise

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

Intel s Gordon Moore made a prediction about the semiconductor industry in the 1960s that has become the stuff of legend. Now known as Moore s Law, that prediction has today become shorthand for rapid technological change. Moore predicted the exponential growth that has driven the semiconductor industry from startup some 50 years ago to more than $200 billion in annual revenue today. Circuits have also become the foundation of the trillion-dollar electronics industry. As integrated circuit costs have decreased, they have made their way into modern products ranging from automobiles to greeting cards. Moore, in addressing this year s International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), discussed some of the coming trends in the semiconductor industry, as well as some of the challenges going forward. For the computer industry, many of the exponential trends are approaching limits that require new solutions if the historic rate of progress is to continue.

Though still in their infancy, sentient computing systems are likely to be everywhere within five years-listening and watching, and ready to anticipate their users every need

Physicists are converging on a "theory of everything," probing the 11th dimension, developing computers for the next generation of robots, and speculating about civilizations millions of years ahead of ours, says Dr. Michio Kaku, author of the best-sellers Hyperspace and Visions and co-founder of String Field Theory, in this interview by KurzweilAI.net Editor Amara D. Angelica

Harvard Business Review author Nicholas Carr misunderstands what information technology is.

We are entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace

Many of the innovations that made the IT industrys fortunes are rapidly becoming commodities-including the mighty transistor

So far, information technology has thrived on exponentials. Now it has to get back to earth, says Ludwig Siegele

In part one of a two-part series, Whitney Tilson argues that the thought process used in good investment decisions can also be applied to thinking sensibly about the debate over Iraq and Saddam Hussein

This is the first study to examine what factors are associated with an increased follower-count on Twitter over an extended period of time. Hutto et al. (2013) studied 507 Twitter users over 15 months and half-a-million tweets

“Stay glad. Keep hoping machine running. Love everybody. Make up your mind.”

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.

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.

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.