It’s hard not to see some disconnect between recent disturbing world news headlines and the market’s quiet advance but this disconnect is rational in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term. Here are 3 rules of thumb for how investors can potentially respond.

Silver has a reputation for being gold’s less desirable sister, but make no mistake, silver may still be a golden opportunity to invest in. Silver's use is already very prevalent in the photography, consumer electronics, medical, and high tech industries and a major consumer of silver in the future will be the green technology sector in products such as solar cells and batteries.

In the last few years a new “advisor” has entered the fray – the robo advisor, now being called “automated investment services”. Automated investment services are platforms that automate your investment portfolio and try to help you reduce fees, increase efficiencies and streamline your process through a simple computerized interface. Here's a look at 4 primary benefits and 4 potential problems to help you decide if such a service is for you.

The S&P 500 is now up over 180% since troughing in March 2009 and it has been almost 3 years since the stock market experienced a 10% correction. Historically, market corrections happen approximately every 2 years on average. [As such,] we think that this rally is getting very long in the tooth and we wouldn't be surprised if we have a healthy pullback in the coming weeks or months.

Analysts and investors seem to be very bearish towards silver, but we think that the fundamentals of silver are now becoming extremely attractive in terms of contrarian opportunities. Volatility and risk are not always commensurate, and we believe that silver offers investors fundamentals that can be much stronger than expected and returns that would be magnified by the small size of the silver market (and the bearish positioning by participants). Contrarian investors would be wise to take note.

If you want to make money long-term, you have to bet against the prevailing consensus of most financial experts. I have never seen such an overwhelming bullish consensus as there is today that the economy is going to do great, that gold is a sell, and that the stock market is going to go higher, and if you want to build speculative wealth, you have to bet against that.

Before gold can rally, it has to first turn the trend from down to up. We see no evidence of a change in trend. The bearish spacing is repeated, again, as a reminder that it represents a weak market within its down trend. How anyone can posit a bullish scenario from what the charts show flies in the face of known facts, as depicted in the charts.

Lifted by a continued surge in Asian gold sales, consumer demand for gold reached an all-time high in 2013 at 3,893 tonnes. Amazingly, 54% of this demand came from two places: India and China. However, it is only recently that the East has dominated global demand for the yellow metal. In this infographic, we look at India and China specifically to see why demand keeps expanding in the East.

Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX) is slowly becoming the de facto standard for measuring gold stock performance. Nearing its eighth birthday, GDX has even usurped the venerable HUI gold stock index as this sector's metric of choice in many circles. Let me explain why that is the case.

A recent Gallup survey on expected future returns of asset prices shows that most Americans still think that owning a home is the best way to generate a high return in the future. Nothing could be further from the truth! It just shows how totally out of touch with reality the average American is.