Auour Insights

Wins above replacement (WAR) is a baseball metric that describes a player’s value in terms of how many more wins he brought to his team than a replacement-level player at his position would have. It is a measure of the effectiveness of an individual within the team and a statistical attempt to quantify if he is worth what he is being paid. Ranking players by WAR might seem harsh, but a company’s resources are finite; it has to deploy its capital strategically and responsibly.

The same can be said for selecting suppliers and partners. Replacement of a supplier may not be

The global equity markets provide the closest thing we have to a free lunch. With little effort, they provide individuals with the means of growing their money over time and above the rate of inflation, thereby providing a savings method that not only preserves purchasing power but increases it.

However, your mom was right when she said there is no such thing as a free lunch. The cost of achieving the markets’ potential is suffering through its volatility. All publicly traded investments likely will gyrate around the eventual trend of progress they can produce. Some of those gyrations will be large

Boston, MA—February 26, 2019— Auour Investments has been awarded a Top Guns designation by Informa Investment Solutions’ PSN manager database, North America’s longest-running database of investment managers. Four of the firm’s investments strategies were recognized for their 1 or 3-year performance for the period ending December 31, 2018.

“We are pleased, once again, to be recognized for our performance.  Our processes became more defensive at the beginning of 2018 and continued to signal a period of heightened uncertainty throughout the year” stated Joseph Hosler, managing principal of Auour.  The firm focuses on delivering ETF-based investment strategies that target full participation in

After a very dismal December (one of the worst market declines in history) and a powerful rebound in January (one of the best months in history), February has been relatively calm. But before you get giddy, we are not convinced the storm has completely passed. As we wrote in our 2019 Outlook, this will be a time for patience. As the drawdown chart below shows, we have not even recovered from our last de-risking event in late November.

We wrote in a recent newsletter (Binary Options, Non-binary Outcomes) that the dire headlines concerning Brexit, U.S.-China trade disputes, and U.S. government shutdown

“The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.”

—Douglas Horton

The Quarter in Review

The fourth quarter ended in rough shape with major equity markets around the globe experiencing one of the worst ends to a calendar year. Equity markets peaked in September when many hoped the U.S. growth engine would be able to lessen the pain from international uncertainty. Unfortunately, that did not last as trade concerns grew and international economic reading deteriorated. U.S. growth companies were particularly hit hard. With their high exposure to international markets and being some of the biggest beneficiaries of global trade, market participants decided that