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The study, performed by finance professors Henrik Cronqvist of Claremont McKenna College and Stephan Siegel of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, draws on “two sets of remarkable data” from Sweden, Zweig says. One data set is available because the Swedish government until recently collected data about each holding of taxpayers’ investment accounts, Zweig says, and the other is available because the Swedish government enters all twin births in a national registry. Cross-referencing the two data sets, the professors were able to track how similar or different twins’ investing behaviors were. They looked to see whether sets of twins demonstrated five main behavioral investing mistakes: inadequate diversification, excessive trading, reluctance to sell at a loss, chasing hot recent performance, and trying to get rich quick.

“Cronqvist and Siegel found, across the twins in their sample, that genetic variation explained between one-quarter and nearly one-half of the extent to which investors suffered from these biases,” Zweig reports. “Inadequate diversification scored the highest, with genetic effects explaining 45.3% of the variation across investors. At the low end, 25.7% of the degree to which investors traded too much was explained by their genetic variation.”

“In January the unemployment rate dropped to a three-year low of 8.3%. Even housing is showing a glimmer of improvement. Sales of existing homes climbed 5% from a month earlier, the third straight monthly increase,” Oberweis writes in his latest Forbes column. “Best of all, it's a presidential­election year. You can be sure that the Obama Administration will do everything in its power to continue these trends. So European crisis be damned, I'm optimistic for 2012.”

And even if the economy scuffles, Oberweis says that opportunities will present themselves among smaller stocks. “It should come as no surprise to readers that I am sticking to my knitting,” he adds. “Innovative small-cap companies will grow in spite of the economic cycle because they create new markets or take share from competitors.” He offers several picks, including Massachusetts-based IPG Photonics.

“While Bill Gross sees a world full of new normals and paranormals, the old normal business cycle continues to show that it is still in gear,” Yardeni writes on his blog. He presents a chart of the trend of initial unemployment claims following the past four cyclical peaks (2009, 2001, 1991, 1982). “The latest cycle looks just like the past three cycles and even the earlier ones too,” he writes. “Jobless claims spike up in recessions. They peak at the end of recessions. They fall sharply early during recoveries. Then they meander for a while at relatively elevated levels above 400,000, causing widespread anxiety that the recovery is jobless. Then they drop closer to 300,000-350,000.”

Yardeni says other economic data — including manufacturing figures and homebuilding data — confirm that we’ve been seeing an “old normal” play out yet again, not the emergence of a “new normal”. Americans, he says, “are getting back to business and doing their darnedest not to get distracted by the apocalyptic scenarios that have been in fashion since the near-death experience of 2008.”

“I don’t want to say we’re off to the races again, because I don’t think we’re going to have really robust growth,” Sonders tells Harlan Levy on Seeking Alpha. “It’s not likely in a deleveraging environment, and the fact that we’re still dealing with this debt problem in the U.S. But I think we’re in the next phase of the recovery that is a little bit more self-feeding that improves confidence and improves spending, which increases demand, which makes businesses hire again, and you get a positive circle.”

Sonders also says that high government debts put a cap on growth, “but that does not mean we’re mired in no-growth territory. We’re likely to see better growth this year than we saw last year.” She says the “heart of this recovery” will be the manufacturing sector, which she says is a welcomed change after the last growth cycle, which was driven by “paper” — i.e., financial engineering.

Sonders also offers an interesting insight on the strong recent jobs numbers, noting that the household data in the Labor Department’s survey has been even better than the headline payroll number. “Household employment was up 631,000 in January. That’s a huge number,” she says. “You also have to pay attention to the fact that he household survey tends to pick up people who have become self-employed or who started a business and small businesses that aren’t picked up in the payroll survey, which tends to capture larger companies, and we know that’s where we’ve been lacking job creation. Where our economy tends to have its greatest job creation is in the small business sector, and it’s in that area where we’re starting to see some life.”

As for the stock market, Sonders says moderate economic growth could bode well. “If we stay in this 3 percent growth range, and that helps keep inflation at bay, that’s a pretty good environment historically for the stock market,” she says.

“Many stock bulls are calling for a 10% to 15% gain this year,” Siegel tells Barron’s. “But I would not be surprised to see the market up 20% or more, even if earnings growth slows.”

Siegel’s research draws on more than a century of stock market returns, and shows a clear trend, Barron’s Gene Epstein says: that after periods of poor performance, the market tends to snap back and push much higher, and vice versa — the so-called “rubber band effect”.

Based on Siegel’s research, Epstein says, “Two-thirds of the time, after a five-year period like the one we’ve just seen, the market rises fast enough to lift the Dow to 15,000 or higher from present levels over the following two years. The same pattern applies to Dow 17,000 or higher, except that happens just half the time.”

Part of Siegel’s bullishness on 2012 is due to the fact that, while earnings growth was strong last year, stocks struggled amid fears of a U.S. economic slowdown and the European debt crisis. “From this point, the market will be sensitive to an easing in both concerns, which Siegel expects will be forthcoming,” writes Epstein. “Economic data so far released have lent credence to a pickup in GDP growth, and future data should lend further support. As for euro land, while the region as a whole is probably in recession already, the market should gain support from continuing signs that a major meltdown is unlikely.”

Epstein notes that the Dow 15,000 and Dow 17,000 targets aren’t really as impressive as they may seem. Assuming just 6% earnings growth in Dow companies over the next two years — well below the 9% consensus estimates — price/earnings ratios would need to expand only slightly, from the current low level of 13.1 to about 13.6. And to get to 17,000 with that 6% earnings growth, the market P/E would need only to climb to 15.4 — a fairly average level.

Siegel’s colleague, Jeremy Schwartz, also discusses how share buybacks have picked up the slack from dividend decreases that have occurred over the past couple decades. And Schwartz offers some interesting data on how the “rubber band effect” has worked over the past century-plus, and to what degree it could impact the market in the coming two years.

“When it comes to major emerging-market economies, Latin America as a whole is certainly no longer the ‘banana republic,’ sorry-state region it once seemed to be,” Reese writes for Real Money. “Take Brazil, for example — the kingpin of this burgeoning economic geographic area. Its population now exceeds 200 million, and its economy ranks as the seventh-largest in the world. ... If you want an internationally diversified portfolio of stocks — and almost everyone should — you need Latin American names.”

Since its inception in 2007, Reese’s Latin America portfolio has been the best performer of several geographic-based portfolios he monitors on the Validea Pro portion of his website. It has risen 58.8% vs. a 4.7% loss for the benchmark index, MSCI EAFE (Morgan Stanley Capital International Europe, Australasia, Far East). The portfolio is already up more than 15% this year.

Reese offers five Latin American stocks his strategies, each of which is based on the approach of a different investing great, are high on right now. Among them: Telecom Argentina, which gets high marks from his Kenneth Fisher-based model.

“Mr. Woodford believes [too many fund managers] are failing to understand the bigger picture of the ongoing banking crisis,” writes Mark Dampier, the head of research at Hargreaves Lansdown, in a piece for MoneyMarketing.co.uk. “He maintains the environment has permanently changed and while policymakers are responding, they have a limited range of tools,” says Dampier, who recently met with Woodford to talk about the market and economy. “He sees no magic wand to make the West's debt problems go away and does not expect a new stock market bull run — at least not one built on solid foundations. The European Central Bank's long-term refinancing operation is, in his view ‘the starting gun for deleveraging.’”

Woodford thinks banks are still in trouble and says some may face nationalization. They will have to write off their bad debts at some point, making credit contraction inevitable. With that in mind, he owns no bank stocks, Dampier writes, adding that Woodford “wants to own companies that are well managed, have strong balance sheets, resilient business models and generate plenty of cash. His focus is on dividends and dividend growth and he believes companies with these characteristics can be found at attractive prices.” Woodford is also high on pharma stocks, with his exposure to the sector at 30%.

“China is experiencing the mother of all bubbles," Peter Chiappinelli, portfolio strategist at Grantham’s GMO, says, according to InvestmentNews.com. “We don’t know when it’s going to pop or what’s going to cause it to pop, but there’s very little track record of countries successfully navigating a soft landing out of a bubble.”

GMO is hedging its China exposure to near zero in the emerging-markets portions of its mutual funds, Chiappinelli said, and it is net short on the country in its hedge fund.