Investment Management

What Is Money For?

What Is Money For? Shelby Cullom Davis got his start in the stock market in the early 1940’s on the heels of the Great Depression. He bought equities on the cheap at a time when other investors had given up on the stock market and just as the United States emerged as the world’s most…

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Quarterly Client Letter: Q4 2023

“I think that a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.” Charlie Munger, 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Investing in financial markets is a constant education. A year ago, a Bloomberg survey of economists forecasted a 65% probability of recession for 2023. As the year progressed, there were plenty of reasons…

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You Only Have to Get Rich Once

You Only Have to Get Rich Once Charlie Munger recently appeared on the Acquired Podcast. Needless to say, we are fans of Munger and recommend listening to the full interview. The interviewers asked Charlie what advice he would give to young people today. Charlie was, unsurprisingly, quite modest in his response. He spent considerable time…

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Quarterly Client Letter: Q3 2023

Quarterly Client Letter: Q3 2023 A soft landing is a primary objective, and I did not say otherwise.  I mean, that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve for all this time. The real point though, is the worst thing we can do is to fail to restore price stability… Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Responding…

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Keep It Simple

Keep It Simple “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” -Groucho Marx I was at a dinner this summer with other portfolio managers from wealth management firms in the Denver area to talk about markets and investing. When we were asked if we invest in private markets on behalf…

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Quarterly Client Letter: Q2 2023

“Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.” -Daniel Kahneman Imagine you are the chief executive of the Finnish tire maker…

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Stock Review: VF Corporation

Stock Review: VF Corporation      We’ve written in the past about our mindset of buying businesses as a way to ground and guide our investment philosophy. In that spirit, we’ve recently added a new business – VF Corporation (VFC) – to our model portfolio. VF Corp is an apparel company that owns outdoor and…

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Is the Bear Market Over?

Is the Bear Market Over? The better question might be – did the bull market ever end? When you pull back and look at long-term averages for stock market indices like the S&P 500, the pullback in 2022 looks fairly benign. The 200-week simple moving average (SMA) is still pointing up and to the right,…

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Why We Own Stocks

Why We Own Stocks “Because profits go up 8% a year, and stocks will follow. That’s all there is to it.” -Peter Lynch   The latest tug of war in the financial punditry is between the “recession camp” and the “soft-landing camp”. In the recession camp we have consumers and corporations lowering their plans to…

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Not-So-Boring Bonds

Not-So-Boring Bonds At the top of 2022, we wrote that stock market multiples were precariously perched after soaring well above historical averages. Since then, multiples have pulled back to more benign averages: Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Guide to the Markets, 12/15/2022 We had also noted that after a relatively calm year in the S&P…

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