Growth or value? It’s one of the most basic questions in the investment world. Pundits debate the attractiveness of growth versus value stocks, and mutual funds neatly chop up the market into “growth” and “value” funds.

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

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

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.

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.

Money manager Jeff Matthews in this blog post offers a thoughtful summary of what he considers the highlights of last weekend’s Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.”

Warren Buffett told CNBC, “We’re selling Moody’s at six times what we paid.”

This week the legendary Guru Warren Buffett, despite an aversion to technology, lost his Twitter-innocence at age 82 and tweeted his first digital proclamation of being to a welcoming cyber-existence with: “Warren is in the House.” The Wall Street Journal responded with a Twitter welcome that read, “Pigs aren’t flying, lambs aren’t lying down with lions, and hell isn’t getting any cooler. But Warren Buffett is joining Twitter.”

Warren Buffett is arguably the most successful investor in history, and a good part of his success is his ability to make investment decisions without being influenced by the combination of emotional factors and subconscious biases that govern most human behavior.

There was no big news at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s annual meeting this past weekend, but there was one great lesson for investors: Perhaps the most important thing you can do when everything seems to be going right in your portfolio is to listen to somebody who insists you are wrong.

"In 1948, we made our GEICO investment and from then on, we seemed to be very brilliant people."

Given that it’s the Berkshire annual meeting this weekend, now is as good a time to roll out these quotes from Warren himself.

Alternative methods have some use, but we think discounted cash flow is the most fundamentally sound way to value the conglomerate, as we discuss in the final installment of our 5-part series.

In Part 4 of a 5-part series, Morningstar's Gregg Warren and Drew Woodbury say valuing Berkshire's insurance and investment units using the float method is hypothetically an improvement, but in practice a number of important problems pop up

In Part 3 of a 5-part series, Morningstar's Gregg Warren and Drew Woodbury say the so-called two-column approach to valuing Berkshire can be useful, but it also has significant shortcomings.

In part 2 of a 5-part series, Morningstar's Gregg Warren and Drew Woodbury look at how book value can provide a rough guide to Berkshire's intrinsic value.

In Part 1 of a 5-part series, Morningstar's Gregg Warren and Drew Woodbury explore the pros and cons of using an earnings multiple to value Berkshire Hathaway.

A look at the worldview and investment philosophy of one of the great investors of our time. Plus, five ETFs that we believe have many of the characteristics that Munger (and Buffett) look for

Although the public is still uncertain who will succeed the Oracle, the split-up of the chairman, CEO, and investment roles likely won't alter Berkshire's overall strategy.

Buffett has the discipline to guide capital back into his firm rather than use it for dividend payouts, but most companies are better off distributing excess cash to shareholders, says Morningstar's Josh Peters.

Buffett has limited opportunities to continue allocating capital within Berkshire at large returns, making it more difficult for the firm to not pay a dividend, says Morningstar's Gregg Warren.

Berkshire still has deep competitive advantages, but its size will cause its moat to narrow over time, says Morningstar's Gregg Warren.

We'd like to see Buffett address future acquisitions, his take on the economy, the firm's succession plan, and more at this year's annual meeting.

Morningstar's Drew Woodbury says Berkshire's increasing cash position and Buffett's succession plan will be among the main focus points this weekend in Omaha.

Ahead of its annual meeting this weekend, wide-moat rated Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B) released results for the first quarter of 2013 that were much stronger than those from the year-ago period. First-quarter revenue increased 15% year over year to $43.9 billion on improved operating results from each of its operating segments. With expenses rising at a much slower rate than revenue, and most of the gains from investments and derivatives falling straight down to the bottom line, Berkshire reported a 49% increase in pretax earnings (to $5.0 billion) and a 51% increase in net earnings (to $4.8 billion). Stripping out the impact of investments and derivatives, operating earnings increased 42% to $3.8 billion. Net earnings per Class A equivalent share were $2,977.

I wrote last week about the many ways in which traditional long only fund managers are institutionally prevented from performing as well as they should – given their above-average intelligence and ample resources.

As Europe’s financial crisis goes from acute to chronic, the dispute over who will bear the costs of resolving it is fueling the emergence of a new generation of political movements. In the so-called periphery, political upstarts promise citizens an alternative to austerity. In the eurozone’s “core” countries, they purport to protect taxpayers from relentless demands for debtor-country relief. How Europe’s leaders respond to these new political challengers will determine whether the monetary union stabilizes or fractures.

The California summit between US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping on June 7-8 comes at a time of heightened tension between the world’s two preeminent powers. But divisive issues – from computer hacking to America’s “pivot to Asia” – must not claim all of the attention. If Obama and Xi lift their heads above the parapets and begin charting a jointly agreed course through the coming decade, they may find that they have much in common.

It is tempting to see the investment trust industry as archaic. The names of the trusts hark back to a belt-and-braces City era, while board members and chairman all shot grouse together. But viewing the sector as a relic is to miss some of the important innovation that has happened in the sector of late. Investment trusts are pulling themselves into the modern era writes Cherry Reynard.

“When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.”

Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

Our poet […] was of middle height, and after he had reached mature years he walked with somewhat of a stoop; his gait was grave and sedate; and he was ever clothed in most seemly garments, his dress being suited to the ripeness of his years. His face was long, his nose aquiline, his eyes rather large than small, his jaws heavy, with the under lip projecting beyond the upper.

“Cheating is especially easy to justify when you frame situations to cast yourself as a victim of some kind of unfairness,” said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the use of prescription drugs to improve intellectual performance. “Then it becomes a matter of evening the score; you’re not cheating, you’re restoring fairness.”

For most of us, a pickle is a pickle. It is something that rests snugly beside a sandwich, or floats in a jar on a deli counter. It is rarely something that occasions cryptographic analysis. A number of years ago, though, Howard Moskowitz, a Harvard-trained psychophysicist and food industry consultant, was asked by Vlasic Pickles to crack “the pickle code.” Losing market share to Claussen, the Vlasic executives wanted to take a hard look at a question that was, surprisingly, rarely asked: What kind of pickles did people really want?

We all know people who are highly intelligent but not very smart. These people get good grades in school, ace a lot of tests, and often succeed professionally. But they nevertheless hold irrational beliefs and do a lot of foolish things. Such people almost certainly have high IQs, but IQ scores do not reflect their particular form of cognitive deficit. Indeed, these people seem to be unable to think and act rationally despite their high intelligence.

I heard it again from this year’s commencement speaker: the common mistake of thinking economics is just about business and making money. I know I’m not the only economics teacher who every year has to disabuse his students (and many of his own colleagues from other disciplines) of that same error.

While the world's economies jockey one another for the lead in the currency devaluation derby, it's worth considering the value of the prize they are seeking. They believe a weak currency opens the door to trade dominance, by allowing manufacturers to undercut foreign rivals, and to economic growth, by fighting deflation.

Government, an aggressive and complex multicellular organism, can be found in nearly every region and climate of the planet, including those such as North America where the natural habitat is often inhospitable. In order to thrive in such climates, government has evolved a variety of sophisticated survival strategies. These have enabled it to co-exist with, and often out-compete, other species.

Development activist Deborah Doane said yesterday on comment is free that Goldman Sachs should admit it drives food prices up through speculation. She excoriates the finance giant for what she sees as its role in 44m across the world being in food poverty, suggesting its charitable efforts amount to little given its speculative activities. She assembles an array of sources purportedly supporting her case.

The New York Times examines a somewhat unexpected investing category attracting increased venture capital interest: food. Says one observer: “Part of the reason you're seeing all these VCs get interested in the food industry is not only is it massive, but like the energy industry, it is terribly broken in terms of its impact on the environment, health and animals.”

Japan is recovering from far more than the tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the global financial crisis: It is also attempting to bounce back from two decades of economic lethargy. The country faced a similar period in the 1920s and early 1930s, leading Japan's then-finance minister to loosen monetary policy, drive down the yen and increase spending. The economy quickly reversed course. Today, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is taking similar steps. This special report examines the implications of Abe's new economic policies and analyzes two problem areas -- finance and higher education.

Whether you are a shelf stocker at Walmart, a second year associate at a consulting company or an equity analyst at an investment bank, you may feel that you are not adequately compensated for the work you do -- in other words, you are underpaid. But underpaid relative to what? How do employers determine compensation levels, and what consequences can these decisions have for the organization?

Six years after the onset of the global financial crisis, economists and policymakers continue to fight bitterly over how to tackle the world's economic woes. Is fiscal stimulus the best medicine -- or is fiscal austerity what's needed?

Consumers of news media want the truth -- but not always the truth alone: They are looking, to some degree, for news that confirms -- or, at least, acknowledges -- their beliefs.

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.

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.

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.