Gregory Curtis is the founder and Chairman of Greycourt & Co., Inc., a wealth management firm. He is the author of three investment books, including his most recent, Family Capital. He can be reached at gcurtis@greycourt.com. Please note that this post is intended to provide interested persons with an insight on the capital markets and is not intended to promote any manager or firm, nor does it intend to advertise their performance. All opinions expressed are those of Gregory Curtis and do not necessarily represent the views of Greycourt & Co., Inc., the wealth management firm with which he is associated. The information in this report is not intended to address the needs of any particular investor.
Has Liberal Democracy Passed Its Expiration Date?
“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” —Winston …
Has Liberal Democracy Passed Its Expiration Date? Read More »
Viral Investing, Part II: What Should I Do Now?
“Profit from folly rather than participating in it. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age.” —Warren Buffett “The true contrarian only buys when it makes him feel physically sick to press the buy key.” …
Viral Investing
“You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don’t realize it at the time.” —Shelby Cullom Davis Given the recent market volatility driven primarily by the outbreak of COVID-19, I thought I would share my current views. But first, a word about terminology. COVID-19 (coined, for reasons best known to them, …
A Remarkable Life
One morning, I received a call from my Zurich lawyer, Dr. Andreas Froriep, who informed me that someone was trying to find out who was behind Arran Isle Improvement Association AG. I burst out laughing. It’s true, I suppose, that the Arran miscreants and their shyster lawyers could litigate in Switzerland for a decade or …
Ending the Abuse of the Aristocrats
The history of tenant abuse by aristocratic landlords goes back in the UK for a thousand years. But the twentieth century turned out to be the Revenge of the Downtrodden. Beginning immediately after World War I, which decimated Britain’s male aristocrats, the Brits determined to destroy their aristocracy, and destroy it they did. Certainly the …
Selling the Castle
If you want to be called Lord Joe, Earl of Arran, you have to own Lochranza Castle and about 1,000 acres surrounding it. The castle was built in the early 1200s and in 1262 King Alexander III granted the castle and its lands to Walter Stewart, the Earl of Menteith. Robert the Bruce supposedly hid …
Buying Your Way Into Nobility
We’re talking about the “subtle maneuvers” we were using to try to drag the charming-but-antediluvian Isle of Arran into the modern era and prevent Lady Jean from hobbling off to the poorhouse. Putting the old ladies to work One day, I arrived on Arran after spending a few days in Edinburgh talking with Lady Jean’s …
Scotch to the Rescue…
Before I describe the “subtle maneuvers” we orchestrated on Lady Jean’s behalf, I want to emphasize that these weren’t all my ideas. They were an amalgam of many conversations with the accountants, estate managers, attorneys, Charles Fforde and Lady Jean herself. I was merely a kind of midwife presiding over their birth. On the other …
The Isle of No Solution
Whenever I traveled to Europe in those days it always seemed to me that I was moving not just through space, but also through time. The Europeans always seemed to be two or three decades behind America, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Traveling to the Isle of Arran, however, was a …
The Changing of the Clan
That evening, after our tour of Arran and another whisky-soaked evening, Charles walked me outside Strabane. He was carrying, for some reason, a large bowl of eggs he’d taken from the refrigerator. “These eggs,” he told me, “are very special Isle-of-Arran eggs from our own chickens. Handled properly, they’re virtually indestructible. Wait here.” Baffled by …
The Mystery Deepens
My inauspicious arrival on the Isle of Arran seemed to have perturbed Lady Jean Fforde not at all. “It’s the smell, dearie,” she said, pounding my back like a jackhammer as I retched into the boxwood. “You’ll be used to it soon enough.” And she was right. Three whiskies later (drunk neat, the Scots never …
Lady Jean
As I dutifully did every morning, I listened to my overnight voicemails. My boss was saying something like this: “Stop what you’re doing and get yourself to the Isle of Arran, and don’t dilly-dally!” Huh? I’d recently returned from an ill-fated trip to the Hopi Tribe in Arizona and I was a bit touchy on …
Why the Extremes Are Gaining
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” —“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats Homo sapiens have lived on the earth for, let’s say, 350,000 years (since we separated from homo erectus). For 349,800 of those years, humans were desperately poor, diseased and ignorant. In the last 200 …
The Rest of the “Great” Democracies
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” —“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats Last week we observed that our own mother country, the United Kingdom (redubbed the Dis-United Kingdom) is crumbling before our very eyes. But the DUK is hardly alone. Let’s take a quick look at …
Britain’s Dis-United Kingdom
“The risk is that moderates will be squeezed out as right and left inflame politics and provoke each other to move to the extremes.” —The Economist Last week we took a look at the Big 3, that is, the three biggest democracies in the world not counting the U.S. What we found was that, once …
A Tour of the World’s Crumbling Democracies
“Around the world, radicalization is making coalition and consensus much harder” —Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times Last week I discussed the abdication of the political middle in the U.S. in favor of radical leftist, rightist and populist ideas. Instead of (as in the past) fringe ideas playing the role of informing public debate and …
The Middle Abdicates
“I think the West has forgotten what democracy means.” —Vera Lengsfeld, holder of the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany’s highest civilian honor Roughly a million years ago I sat down one day and, in a fit of pique, wrote a long essay entitled, “The Essential Liberal.” That essay was published in a journal headquartered in …
The Investment Policy Statement
“Te Kaitiaki Tãhua Penihana Kaumatua õ Aotearoa.” —The New Zealand Super Fund, in Mãori The final strategy Te Kaitiaki Tãhua Penihana Kaumatua õ Aotearoa follows (at least for purposes of this series of blog posts) is to create and follow religiously an investment policy statement (IPS). The Super Fund—switching back into English—calls its IPS a …
Responsible Investing
We are observing how one of the world’s most successful investors—the New Zealand Super Fund—manages its capital, and considering whether we might not mimic some of what the Fund has been doing. The idea is to improve our own returns both on an absolute basis and on a risk-adjusted basis. Here are two more strategies …
Are You Really Able to Think and Act Long Term?
Investing like the New Zealand Super Fund is surprisingly easy—in concept. In practice, of course, it’s devilishly difficult. Otherwise, we’d all be rich. To see why this is the case, let’s examine some of the key features of the Super Fund’s investment approach. Thinking and acting long term. We pointed out last week that merely …
Invest Like the Super Fund
“Hi, I’m Joe and I just turned eight. I love playing with my Grandpa. Grandpa always has time to play with me. He says that’s because he is retired and gets his ‘super’ or pension payments from the Government.” —New Zealand Super Fund Explained (from a short animation on the Super Fund website explaining the …
Hong Kong Will Mean China’s Demise
“China’s disintegration is now under way.” —Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania Following the Tiananmen Square fiasco, Beijing “knew” a few things it hadn’t known before. Beijing knew that offering its citizens modest economic and personal freedoms was dangerous to the health of the Communist Party. When you offered such freedoms, …