When I went to the Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B) annual meeting in 2009, there was something I really wanted to do. No, it wasn’t a chat with Warren Buffett. That’s almost impossible at the yearly “Woodstock for Capitalists,” and only first-timers make the trek… Read More

Even as we look to post 10% to 15% annual gains for our portfolios, the occasional 50% gainer never hurts. So I like to look at the market’s biggest winners to see what’s working right now. Some of these big gainers may even have more room to run. Read More

Barring a year-end shocker, 2010 will go down as a good year for stocks. The S&P 500 is up more than 10% this year, and roughly 75% of stocks in the index are in the black in 2010. Of course, the other 25% would like to get past 2010,… Read More

The economic downturn was brutal for the ad industry. Advertising is the first thing to get cut when companies grow cautious, and ad budgets are only now beginning to thaw out. Investors have spotted the turn, bidding up shares of key players. But if you have a 3-4… Read More

Every year, The Economist magazine provides predictions for global economic growth for the coming year. This year, it projects the fastest-growing countries will be Qatar, Ghana, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. China and India won’t be far behind and are expected to grow GDP more than 8% next year. Below is… Read More

Just a little more than a decade ago, most investors wouldn’t put a dime in this emerging country, even if they were using someone else’s money. But plenty can change in a short amount of time, and today the story is vastly different. Now… Read More

One of the curious aspects of the recent rebound in the IPO market is the heavy slate of China-based companies in the mix. It remains pretty hard for U.S.-based companies to line up a deal, but investment bankers have had little trouble if the… Read More

There is a whole range of ways to value a company, from its price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio to its Return on Equity (ROE). Yet investors should really be focused on free cash flow (… Read More

The risky part of investors blindly counting on long-standing hot streaks is that when the streaks finally turn cold, the fallout is enormous. On the flipside, the resumption of those winning streaks makes for incredible turnaround stories. There’s no better example… Read More

Not many people have heard of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA for short, much less know what it does. But this little-known government agency was created by the Department of Defense in the late 1950s to ensure the U.S. military’s technical superiority. Even more interesting to investors, it… Read More