Like watching an old friend who fell from the high life as a special bracket investment banker to a stumbling drunk, I can't help but pity Japan's beleaguered stock investors. Since peaking in 1989 at 39,800, they have been mired in a 20 year bear market, the longest in history, and there is no sign of the index climbing substantially off the current 10,000 level anytime soon. I have watched with dismay as GDP growth shriveled from a white hot 10% in the sixties, to 7%, 5%, 3%, and now 1%, and share prices reflect this.

My guest on Hedge Fund Radio this week is Ed Merner, CEO of the Atlantis Japan Growth Fund (LSE-AJG), who has long been rated the number one stock picker in the Land of the Rising Sun...

I have long sat beside the table of Mckinsey & Co., the best management consulting company in Asia, hoping to catch some crumbs of wisdom...

I don’t care how many times you ask me, I’m not going to replace Ken Lewis as the new CEO of the Bank of America (BAC)...

Desperate homeowners counting on a “V” shaped recovery in residential real estate prices to bail them out better first take a close look at global demographic data, which tells us there will be no recovery at all...

Having spent a decade living in Japan sharing shoe box sized apartments, living on fish heads, rice, and instant ramen, I am something of an authority on that enchanting country...

Lunch with the Central Intelligence Agency is always interesting, although five guys built like brick shithouses staring at me intently didn’t help my digestion...

When a retired Israeli Air Force general calls me up in the middle of the night and tells me there’s a company I should look into, I sit up and take notice...

I spent the evening speaking to Gao Jie, a Beijing civil judge who left the bench to join China’s growing environmental movement when her kids came home from school one day coughing and wheezing...

Those transfixed by gold blasting through the $1,000 level have been missing the real action in silver...