“All a man has to do to get rich in America is find out where people are going, get there first and buy land.” — Gen. Douglas MacArthur Bob Hope, the great American comedian and Hollywood star, was actually born in England. He once quipped, “I left England at the age of ...read more

I’ve long held that mutual funds are full of bad habits, like a boy who can’t stop picking his nose and burping at the dinner table. If you had to design a poor investor, you need look no further than the typical mutual fund. For example, the typical mutual fund turns ...read more

About 7,050 feet above sea level, high in the snowy Sierra Nevada Mountains, lies a little frozen meadow called Gin Flat. It got its name from a speak-easy that closed long ago. Nestled amid a forest of pine and cedar, a little scientific outpost measures snowfall — and has done ...read more

Ultra high-strength and super-light steels are the plastics of the 21st century. There is high demand for these steels for use in everything from jet engines to rail components. In turn, there is a big push for the quirky metals so critical in making them. And in those quirky metals ...read more

China is the new Germany. At the end of the Second World War, Germany was an “emerging market.” It was industrializing rapidly and producing brisk economic growth. Today, Germany is a mature “developed market” that grows slowly if it grows at all. Today, China is the new Germany. The industrial dynamism ...read more

Has oil hit its peak price or not? The answer to that question leads us to ask whether or not commodities are a bubble about to burst. Barron’s recent cover story on commodities came down on the side that the party was over. I believe the charts I have in this ...read more

The highest natural arch in the world is 25 miles southwest of Kashi, Xinjiang, China. It’s made of sandstone and nearly 1,200 feet tall. Eric Shipton (1907-1977), the famed British mountain climber, “discovered” the arch in 1947. Of course, he really didn’t “discover” it in the usual sense. Local Chinese had ...read more

“[Nature] is rich, she is generous, she refuses to no one who will ask his share of her treasure of which she has inexhaustible reserves in the trees, in the mountains, in the sea. But one must know how to climb the tall trees, how to go into the mountains… ...read more

Interesting how certain investment threads come together… I read recently that copper producers are complaining about the skyrocketing costs of sulfuric acid. A few days later, I read about Mosaic, a fertilizer company — about how the rising cost of sulfuric acid could impact its profit margins. Then last week, I ...read more

I’ll start in the tiny Swiss resort of Davos, the site of the World Economic Summit’s annual conference. Davos has long been a popular place with the well-to-do and those suffering from respiratory ailments. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson wintered here back in 1880. Many others have since. Today, Davos is ...read more