I rarely discuss bonds here which could be seen as surprising since it is a huge market, one that every investor ends up buying in. The explosion of ETF’s has also made it much easier and affordable to invest in as well. it has even made it possible to create fully diversified retirement ETF portfolios.

The Life Sciences Report: Have any of the proposals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Critical Path Initiative begun to collapse timeframes or make drug development more efficient and less capital-intensive?
Juan Sanchez: When the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative first came out in 2004, it made a lot of sense. Back then, there were conversations on Wall Street about different parties and the FDA working together. That led to unique collaborations and kind of a different culture.

In four years, the annual event went from 350 to 1,500 attendees with 858 companies participating, including 76 public companies, according to Sara Jane Demy, president of Demy-Colton Life Science Advisors and conference co-founder. The conference, which ran Jan. 9–11, gave small-cap and private biotech companies and investors a focused home during the busy J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. “This industry attracts really smart people who are trying to find ways to cure disease and, along the way, earn money for their investors.

Even though you know that trading the headlines is a sucker’s game, plenty of people who continually miss that memo wind up driving stocks up or down based on what they think the day’s headlines really mean.
The bad news isn’t just that your positions can get hurt if stocks go down but, moreover, that they can get driven up artificially based on false optimism … which can cause them to crash even harder when the real news comes out, or when the next batch of headlines isn’t as positive (even if only in perception) as the last.

By Jeff Clark, Casey Research
There are a number of reasons why many of us believe gold stocks will shoot for the moon before this bull market is over – they’ve done so many times in the past… the gold price still has a long way to climb… and producers are generating record revenue and profits. But I think there’s another reason why gold stocks will soar – one that hasn’t dawned on many in the industry yet.
The premise for my theory first lies in how gold itself is viewed.

The Life Sciences Report: Geoff, what is your current theme?
Geoff Meacham: We were very bullish on the biotech group in 2010 and 2011. Fundamentals are still very good, but I would say we’re more cautious on the performance of the group for all of 2012. One of the things we pointed out in our 2012 Global Biotech Outlook is that the tone of the group before 2012, literally last fall, was very negative. We offered a couple of ideas of what could change the sentiment very positively. It turns out that a lot of that stuff actually happened.