Two prominent figures in the investment world recently offered sharply different perspectives on the most prudent approach for advisors.

One such opportunity is Treasury bonds, which Bernstein said serve as an effective diversifier to equities. Treasury bonds have been negatively correlated to equities in the recent past, he said, and they can reduce the risk associated with an allocation to equities.

There has been considerable throughput of gold in western capital markets, with substantial buying from all round the world following the April price crash. The supply can only have come from two sources: the general public, or one or more governments.

Gold conspiracy theorists have a new bogeyman. Inventories of gold bars held in the COMEX warehouses are falling. This fact is offered to support the stale allegations of “fractional gold” and “manipulation”. They have been predicting a “signal failure” that is coming any day now, like the Great Pumpkin in the Charlie Brown Halloween special. If not that, then surely at least the price of gold is going “to da moon”. Any day now, we have been repeatedly told, every day and every dollar down from the peak around $1900.

Stocks have seen some selling pressure, while other assets have also reversed course. We believe this is the start of the next phase of investing, with an increase in volatility and more grinding action likely.

May saw another massive exodus of retail investors from mutual fund schemes. Around 700,000 equity folios were closed, the highest ever monthly closure in the sector's history.

Can you explain what is happening in markets now?

Here are three things I’ve learned from Warren over the years:

Let’s return to the question of how much investors should pay for growth. Since 1995, Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S has been compiling analysts’ consensus short-term earnings growth (STEG) expectations over the next 12 months (52 weeks since 2005) for the S&P 500. Data are also available for long-term growth (LTEG) expectations over the next five years.

In 1991, Seth A. Klarman published “Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor.” This book outlined his thoughts and approach to investing.

Hargreaves Lansdown is telling investors to embrace the sell-off in shares, concentrate on long goals if they are invested, and use it to look for opportunities if they missed the rally.

There's no way to sugarcoat the dismal performance of the precious metals in recent months. But a revisitation of the reasons for owning them reveals no cracks in the underlying thesis for doing so.

His style is more Graham than Buffett given the amount of money he manages currently. But Amitabh Singhi has got Buffett’s rule no.1 nailed.

Robert Hagstrom, chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Investment Counsel, has always exhibited a keen interest in understanding what lies behind the scenes. His first book, The Warren Buffett Way, spent 21 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 1 million copies. Outside the United States, The Warren Buffett Way still continues to be the book most commonly mentioned by young investors as the source from which they initially learnt about Buffett’s methodology. Hagstrom’s latest book, his eighth, is titled Investing: The Last Liberal Art.

As investors, we’re always balancing our desire to grow our money with our fear of losing it. That balancing act has never been tougher.

The connection between the stock market and the economy seems obvious. If the latter is performing well, the former should follow. In reality, not only is the opposite typically true—stocks lead the economy—but the two can often appear to be completely disconnected.

Executives overburdened by the demands of their companies’ short-term investors may yearn for a more supportive crowd that might be less skittish about volatility. Such investors would base their decisions on a deeper understanding of a company’s strategy, performance, and potential to create long-term value—and would not pressure a company for short-term gains at the expense of greater long-term growth.

After five months of stock market gains, the trade was clear, Joe Terranova of Virtus Investment Partners said Tuesday."I think the right strategy is simple," he said, adding that institutional money would not return until the next quarter, giving the market time to settle down.

INVESTMENT professionals and marketers tend to make investing seem a lot more complicated than it is.

Investors are very often drawn to flashy, exciting stocks — those that exhibit the most volatility. But, says Mark Hulbert, they should be doing the exact opposite.

Piece by tiny piece, Thomas Gayner is building the next Berkshire Hathaway.He is the chief investment officer, and one of three presidents, of a company that you may not have heard about, Markel Corp. MKL +2.38% , based in Richmond, Va.

BMO Capital's Brian Belski has increasingly sounded alarms as the stock market blew past his once-bullish targets.

After his reprinting of the “And a Prediction” section, Buffett discusses investment results for the first half of 1962. Below I have reproduced the important parts of this section.

I just read an old Forbes piece on Walter Schloss: Making money out of junk. As many regular readers know, Schloss is one of my all time favorite investors. Read more about Schloss on my resource page and also check the Walter Schloss category. He made 21% per year for 47 years, investing in a simple, methodical, low stress manner working 9-4:30 with no other employees or assistants other than his son Edwin.

In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.

The stage was thus set for the final “run” on the dollar and for a spectacular default by the designated “reserve currency” provider under the gold exchange standard’s second outing. And as it happened, the American people saw fit to install in the White House in January 1969 just the man to crush what remained of gold-based money and the financial discipline that it enabled.

In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

When I became chairman of the Federal Reserve, there was a general feeling in this country that economic affairs and inflation in particular, had reached a kind of crisis point. Things were not going very well. There was a feeling of uncertainty. There was a lot of speculation in commodities and the gold price, which was then free to fluctuate up to $800 an ounce. In an odd kind of way, that’s a good time to step into a job because people thought that something needed to be done.

When a country's GDP stops growing or starts glowing more slowly, the focus is generally placed on macroeconomic policy and fiscal spending. But it's not blind GDP growth that leads to our wealth. After all, one can increase GDP by borrowing and spending on just about anything, even if it does nothing to increase wealth. (Some examples include: starting a war, building a city that sits unoccupied, digging holes in the ground and then filling them back up.)

Almost immediately after the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were revealed to be immigrants, opponents of immigration reform in the United States seized on the case to highlight the danger of adopting a more open approach to the issue. After all, stoking public fears effectively derailed immigration reform in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; why shouldn’t it work today, as the US Congress takes up the issue again?

Latin America and the United States have experienced what one could call a series of “marijuana moments” over the past few weeks. Given growing support for ending the senseless and bloody decades-long “war on drugs,” these signs of progress toward decriminalization and legalization should not pass unremarked.

“The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.”

Washington is a place renowned for folly. But insiders and outsiders define “folly” differently. For denizens of D.C., folly means cutting the federal budget.

No matter how much pushing on the market- or economic-string a central planner tries, eventually the risk-based pricing of credit (as opposed to nominal price based stocks) turns the corner from accepting rising leverage as potentially good thing for growth to worrying that cash flows are at risk from an over-generous management transfer to shareholders.

The secret behind the actual age of your brain is inside your eyes.

Modern medicine and technology can change the way we define our physical and psychological selves. Is a prosthetic arm “your own arm” in the same sense that its biological predecessor seemed to be? Might taking antipsychotic medication fundamentally change your personality? Could an organ transplant from a pig, or from a violent murderer, somehow change who you are?

IN the early 1970s, a team of researchers dropped hundreds of stamped, addressed letters near college dorms along the East Coast and recorded how many lost letters found their way to a mailbox. The researchers counted each posted letter as a small act of charity and discovered that students in some of the dorms were more generous than others.

For a good part of the past decade, I’ve taught negotiation skills to diverse audiences—Fortune 500 executives, generals in the U.S. Army and Air Force, and professional athletes in the NFL and NHL. They tend to excel at preparing, analyzing options, and establishing a strong position. Yet some of their communication choices fly in the face of the best data on what actually works at the bargaining table.

Europe has been postponing the recapitalization of its banking sector. This column argues that it has been doing so for far too long. Without such a recapitalization, the danger is that economic stagnation will continue for a long period, thereby putting Europe on a course towards Japanese-style inertia and the proliferation of zombie banks.

On July 19, 2010, the Washington Post published the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic US apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost-unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.

Hirschman made his arguments without mathematical formulas or complex models. His subject was economics, but his spirit was literary. “The only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play,” he wrote, “is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

I divide my time into two main areas: business development (this includes networking, meetings, discussing ideas with prospective investors, etc., in other words, everything it takes to run my business) and In the latter category, the majority of my time is spent doing two things: idea generation (building watch lists, reading, screening, etc.) and researching (going through items I’ve placed on my watch list in greater detail). So investing is a never-ending interplay between getting ideas and researching ideas. I think of this general concept as “idea inventory.”

"Today, an economic forecast is more like the analysis of a criminal mind than the evaluation of economic data."

We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts; The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas are still with us. But time has not been kind.

People who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder (indicated by their level of education, occupation, or income) have shorter and less healthy lives, on average, than those on higher rungs. Indeed, life expectancy at birth often varies by 5-10 years, depending on social and economic well-being, with poorer people spending 10-20 more years of life suffering from illness or disability than their wealthier counterparts.

During the recent hearing on the constitutionality of the European Central Bank’s measures to prevent the euro zone from falling apart, Andreas Vosskuhle, President of Germany’s Constitutional Court, raised an important question: Do non-German economists condemn the ECB’s outright monetary transactions (OMT) as unequivocally as all but one of the German experts testifying?

“All you can do is sit back and bask in your relevance to the cosmos.”

Reading above an elementary level involves asking the right questions in the right order.

Psigma’s chief investment officer Tom Becket has set out how he believes the fund will generate income in what some are calling a yield free world without concentrating risk.

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.

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.

Military parents stationed overseas are able to communicate with their children in novel and important ways through the San Diego-based Family Literacy Foundation's United Through Reading program, which has won the $25,000 Peter F. Drucker Award for Non-profit Innovation for 2006.

China's labs may soon rival its powerhouse factories—and multinationals are flocking in for tech innovation

How can companies innovate without falling into the trap of needless proliferation in their products or services? The key, according to Wharton faculty and experts from George Group Consulting, is understanding unmet and unarticulated consumer needs while aligning innovation processes to those insights.

As companies struggle to innovate in today's competitive environment, they need to continually guard against adding to their "clutter" -- the creeping impact of complexity on efficiency and cost-competitiveness. In this three-part special report, experts from Wharton and George Group Consulting discuss how management can approach this problem by thinking "ambidextrously" -- that is, focusing on innovation and broad exploration while minimizing the impact of clutter on operational processes and costs. Also, in the accompanying podcast (with transcript), Mike McCallister, CEO of Humana, discusses balancing innovation and complexity in the health care industry.

Recently I visited a conference in San Jose that targeted entrepreneurs in the technology industry. You might think that after all the torrents in the public markets and the high-tech meltdown during the past couple of years, such a conference would be pretty lackluster. With rumors of Prozac sales in Silicon Valley skyrocketing, you might even think that the place would be downright depressed.

NASDAQ was the market for technology stocks. Now NASDAQ itself is under severe pressure from other platforms, called ECNs (electronic communications networks) which use technology to lower transaction costs , thus eating into NASDAQs market share. These ECNs are also merging now, to get bigger clout. This article talks about Instinet's merger with The Island ECN, in a $ 508 m. all stock deal. This is months before NASDAQ introduces SuperMontage, a new order and execution system to provide better liquidity. In India we are seeing shutting down of regional exchanges. Barring NSE and BSE, other exchanges have virtually no trading. These issues were also covered in the 'Capital Markets Reforms' roundtable organised by ISB-CIO and can be viewed at http://www.capitalideasonline.com/rtc/isb/9may2002/secondrtc_part1.htm

"Do you need a fresh start on creativity? Stanford professor Robert Sutton is a unique voice with an urgent message about how to generate and capitalize on new ideas."

"Only a few years ago, B2B exchanges were expected to completely alter conventional buyer-supplier relationships. The reality has been otherwise. Only 10% of the 1,000 B2B exchanges launched in the past 18 months are reportedly still in operation. Meanwhile, the important B2B action seems to have shifted to industry-wide exchanges run by incumbent firms, such as Covisint in the auto industry and Transora in the consumer products sector. In a new research study, Wharton management professor John Paul MacDuffie and colleague Susan Helper explore this evolution.

( Free Registration Required) "Is the lecture hall outdated? Management education needs to be radically rethought for an Internet age, becoming more customizable, with delivery anytime and anyplace, and more applied, interactive learning. Two Wharton professors, Jerry Wind and David Reibstein, discuss a new paradigm for management education facilitated by advances in information technology and how it might be integrated into a decision support system. Wind is also leading the creation of a program that attempts to implement these principles in practice."

"The best way to prepare for the future is to see it come to life before your eyes. That's why executives from the world's leading financial-services companies come play at the Merlin Center."

"Paul Sagel and Bob Dirksing are two of the leaders behind an important new product for Procter & Gamble -- one that has its customers, as well as its executives, smiling about the company's approach to innovation."

"Jeff Weedman is a man with an innovative mission -- to open up Procter & Gamble's treasure trove of patents (some 27,000 at last count) to the outside world. Why? Because selling off old ideas forces everyone to come up with new ideas faster. "

"Everybody wants brands. And there are a lot more poor people in the world than rich people. To be a global business . . . you have to participate in all segments." --Keki Dadiseth, Unilever"

"Groove makes it possible to light up the edge. Groove -and peer-to-peer platforms like it - gives everybody the tool set to engage in peer communities, at work and at home. It democratizes technology in the same way that Lotus 1-2-3 democratized spreadsheets and the Internet democratized content. At first, companies that embrace peer-to-peer computing will engender confusion and cross-purpose. But if the leaders of those companies are patient, if they engage the edge and work with it, they will finally harness all the power of the edge. Very few companies do that today. Now they're going to have the chance. Peer-to-peer is technology's next corporate character test."

"Who says only world-famous historians can draw valuable lessons from the past? Fast Company's readers' network takes a page from the book of historian Stephen E. Ambrose and draws parallels between the transcontinental railroad and the Internet."

"In an interview Clayton Christensen, author of the book, "The Innovator's Dilemma" talks about the markets today that are vulnerable to disruptive technologies."

"A battle is under way for the new economy. Which side are you on?"

"Has Built to Flip overthrown Built to Last? Should it? Fast Company asked five commentators to tell us where they come down on these questions - and to offer strong opinions that will spark debate."

"The new economy is about unlimited opportunity, democracy in the workplace, and a commitment to link financial rewards to individual contribution and effort. Increasingly, though, the new economy is also about economic inequality, rampant opportunism in the marketplace, and a troubling disconnect between unreal financial rewards and any individual's real contribution and effort. The promise of the new economy speaks to our fundamental sense of economic fairness, social equity, and personal freedom. But there is also a danger underlying the new economy: Excess and exploitation can undermine even the most robust period of economic growth and wealth creation."

"For any innovator, the most important thing is to find your network of safe havens - the people who support what you're doing."

"According to the creative people behind the BrainStore, an "idea factory" in Biel, Switzerland, it's possible to generate new ideas with as much rigor, and as much speed, as it takes to make products on an assembly line."

"The fact is, the wild oscillations in our business life will continue to get under wilder and wilder, probably forever."

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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.