“If I can be optimistic when I’m nearly dead, surely the rest of you can handle a little inflation” – Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (99 years old) We’ve been saying for a while that today’s market landscape is shaping up to be quite different from the past. We said it first in...Read More

In our first note of the year, we said patience would be required as the world worked through high inflation and tightening monetary conditions. We suggested that the last 20 years have conditioned investors to assume economic events happen quickly and resolve quickly. We cautioned that this time may be different from the recent past—that...Read More

Dollar Dominance The media often plays up the narrative that the U.S. dollar is about to lose its dominance. We can understand investors’ fear but cannot find an argument that warrants the decline in dollar power. We could find reasons to think the dollar may lose some value relative to others but to lose its...Read More

Prescribed Fire White oaks are large, deciduous trees native to eastern North America. The wood from the white oak is highly valued for its strength, durability, and resistance to decay and insect damage. It is also appreciated for its lack of porosity, making it vital to the spirits industry, which ages bourbon in oak barrels...Read More

Warren Buffett famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked,” which seems appropriate right now. With the period of easy and plentiful money in the rearview mirror, we see cracks within some banks agitating the investment markets. At first, it was one bank tied to the crypto...Read More

We sit 13 months since the equity markets hit their high. The low in equity prices occurred about five months ago. As we noted in our last newsletter, growth in corporate profits is only now turning negative, and many past reliable signals would suggest that a period of economic softness is in front of us....Read More

From The Perfect Storm Our investment objective is to produce above-market, risk-adjusted returns—over an investment cycle—at a lower level of experienced risk while mitigating the declines our clients experience over that investment cycle. Over the course of nine years, we have—to date—achieved it. [Past performance does not guarantee future returns.] Our method is to detect...Read More

A Changing Story This past year experienced a change in the investment story. The year started with the belief that inflation was transitory. Now, the story is one of higher for longer inflation. With historic changes in interest rates and global central banks determined to fight it at almost all costs, the story increasingly became...Read More

We started Auour almost ten years ago with the desire to invest people’s hard-earned savings in a way to mitigate market downturns without sacrificing the market’s potential during the good times. It is a challenging objective. Our means of outperforming is to lose less in bad markets—though great over the long term; it feels like...Read More

It is hard to shake a stick without hitting an economist these days. And given how lousy a job they have been doing forecasting the economy, we would argue that a giant stick is needed so that we can hit more of them! We want to focus on two economists with different ideas, Thomas Malthus...Read More