What would the optimal portfolio allocation in gold have been according to Modern Portfolio Theory over several different periods of time? This article has a look at how an investor could have combined gold and equities to enhance risk-adjusted returns.

Investing in natural resources and precious metals is attractive today because the sector is so much cheaper than it was three years ago. Many of the stocks are trading at a 90 percent discount to their prices in 2011. For a contrarian investor, I believe that we are seeing a historic opportunity now.

Once the temporary effects of past & current manipulation of the price of gold subsides we will have a continuation of the bear market in the Dow Jones and a continuation of the bull market in gold. If the secular cycle repeats, we can conclude that the Dow Jones will be priced at an ounce of gold or even less.

Following the 2007-09 financial crisis, many investors decided they needed insurance on their portfolio to protect against the possibility of another “black swan” event and poured money into a host of new funds that were supposed to help if there was another downturn — long/short funds, tail risk strategies, absolute return funds, option hedging strategies, tactical asset allocation funds and the like - but they missed the idea completely. They were trying to plan ahead for uncertain events that could surprise everyone. Of course this is impossible, because you can’t hedge out the risks of unknown events - they’re unknown after all. So how should an investor protect oneself from another such occurrence? The answer is below.

There is little the United States can do militarily to change the outcome in Ukraine...but this does not mean the United States is helpless. No sooner had the Russian invasion become clear than the White House announced the possibility of economic sanctions against Russia....By implementing such sanctions, the United States has moved in the direction of a new kind of warfare — not kinetic war involving ships, planes and missiles — but financial war involving cash, stocks, bonds and derivatives. The policy question, and an important question for investors, is how far can this type of financial warfare go and how effective can it be? What will the impact of financial war be on markets in general and investors in particular?

We fail to pay attention to the warnings signs as long as we see no immediate danger and keep our foot pressed to the accelerator believing that since it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t. This time is only “different” from the perspective of the “why” and “when” the next major event occurs. Below are analyses and exhibits to support that contention.

For the first time in U.S. history, the national debt has risen past $17 trillion. That number is a bit hard to comprehend and means little to Americans when not applied to their everyday lives. So just how does the national debt affect consumers, and why should the average American care about how much this country owes? Here's why and how.

The plunge in emerging markets that started this year has given us the Fragile Five (Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey and India), courtesy of Morgan Stanley, because their big current-account deficits mean they are acutely vulnerable to a sudden exit of foreign capital. The trouble is, it isn't true. The next crisis will start, as did the last one, in one of the developed economies [and this time round] it is likely to come from one of these 5 countries:...

Canada’s housing market is the most expensive in the world - 60% overvalued by historical standards - and one simple reason explains it.

Obama has introduced the MyRA account and it is the prelude for eventually taking over the country’s entire pension programs, taking over all the accounts, (stealing your lifetime savings), and exchanging them for the US Treasury Bonds the Fed cannot sell to countries anymore. This is the only way the US government can cover its trillion $ (and growing) deficit spending. Got gold- physical gold?