We recently watched a TED talk by fiction author John Green. He opened his talk by discussing Agloe, a made-up town in New York that he used in his book Paper Towns. Agloe was created by the cartographers who made Esso maps in the 1930s as a means of detecting future plagiarism. If Agloe found...Read More

We are keeping with our summer series of more charts and fewer words. Most of this newsletter will be discussing interest rates, inflation and why many fear the eventual monetary stimulus unwind. The chart above attempts to rebuild a history of U.S. interest rates over the span of the country’s independence. Two items stick out...Read More

If you follow us on LinkedIn, you will notice our desire to improve our vocabulary through the launch of the Auour Word of the Day (AWOTD). Within this note, you will see demonstrations of our fresh learnings. As with our last note, however, we are going to keep text to a minimum and not perorate...Read More

Summer has officially begun. Humidity is rising on the East Coast. The Pacific Northwest is hitting temps we have never seen before. Sunburns are fading into tans. With summer hitting its stride, then, we will keep this note short… We love what Mark Twain said about speculation: “There are two times in a man’s life...Read More

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.” —Frédéric Bastiat Not a day goes by without an article discussing inflation. And since that is the topic of this article, today will not be the exception. Good inflation, bad inflation, deflation,...Read More

In the early 1980’s, Dave Davies, of the English rock band the Kinks, wrote the song, “Living on a Thin Line.” He was writing about England as the last century waned, but it resonates today with our current economic situation. Economic life sits on a changing and unstable ground at this moment. At Auour, our...Read More

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” – Ecclesiastes 1:4 Note: We have been consistently concerned about very high valuations in the global investing markets as well as a growing set of participants whose investment patterns are gambling-like. While we remain concerned about those things, in this newsletter...Read More

It has always puzzled us when relatively recent history repeats itself, especially since we have the ability to study and apply lessons from the past and alter our behavior. Nevertheless, we feel we are reliving 1999 and 2000 today, with the current dramatic rise in the share prices of a select group of securities, the...Read More

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” Benjamin Graham (father of value investing) This is not a time for relatives. Don’t worry, Mom, we aren’t referring to family. We mean that justifying an investment based on its attractiveness relative to the prices...Read More

“…the most dramatic thing that’s almost ever happened in the entire world history of finance.” – Charlie Munger when discussing the current stock market environment. There is a saying in the investment world, “You might know when you are in an investment bubble but still have no clue when or how it pops.” As we...Read More