Dear friends,
Winter is coming.
I’m so thankful.
And welcome to the modestly delayed December issue of the Mutual Fund Observer.
Traditionally, year’s end has been a slower time. The growing season has ended, and both the farm fields and the sports fields lie mostly empty in this part of the country. Going out at night is just a touch less attractive when “night” settles Continue reading →
It’s November!
Had you noticed?
That means so many things, so many changes. It’s the onset of The Golden Quarter, aka Fourth Quarter Holiday Retail Season when an inexplicable sense of panic and social obligation separates consumers from Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to the Samhain / the coming of the dark edition of the Mutual Fund Observer!
October is an interesting month. Traditionally perilous for the financial markets. It begins with the sullen remnants of summer and ends with festivals of the harvest (even for those of us in cities) and of the coming season when nature slips into dormancy. Halloween, whose sales now begin in August and whose iconic ghouls now Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to the September (aka “back to school”) issue of the Mutual Fund Observer. The joyful tumult of which has slightly delayed our launch.
Despair is easy. If you ever want an antidote, drop by Augie at the beginning of September. As many of you know, in my day job, I am a professor of communication studies and director of the Austin E Knowlton Honors Program at Augustana College. I am also an advisor to first-year students. I’ve spent much of the last week meeting with and learning about my new charges. I am amazed by them, defying as they do all of the hysterical media headlines about Continue reading →
“It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do.” Walter Winchell
Walter who? O tempora! O mores!
At the height of his popularity, in the late 1930s, 50 million people—two-thirds of American adults—read Winchell’s syndicated column and listened to his 15-minute Sunday-night radio broadcast. He positioned himself as a champion of “Mr. and Mrs. America,” and was the most powerful – or, at least, most Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to Really, Really Summer … and to the July issue of Mutual Fund Observer.
Summertime is an especially blessed and cursed interval for those of us who teach. On the one hand, we’re mostly freed from the day-to-day obligation to be in the classroom. Some of us write, some travel, and some undertake “such other duties as may from time to time be assigned” by our colleges. On the other hand, we hear the clock ticking. All year long, as we try to face down a stack of 32 variably literate essays at 11 p.m. Sunday night, we think “If I can just make it to summer, I’ll Continue reading →
Dear friends,
It’s been a whirlwind month for us. In just about 30 days, I got married (waves to Chip!), finished my 68th trip around the big ball o’ fire in the sky, bade farewell to my 40th group of seniors (just a heads up, world. They’re coming for you!), visited with the managers from FPA (really, if you put Mr. Scruggs in a cardigan he’d totally rock the Mr. Rogers’ look), watched the Dow hit 40,000 and visited my brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh for the first time in two years.
Dear friends,
Welcome to the May issue of Mutual Fund Observer. We’re glad you’re here.
May marks the end of my 40th year of teaching at Augustana College. (And no, they’re not free of me yet. I’m back again in the fall!) It’s an amazing place that has grown a lot over the course of my career. We were founded in 1860 by educated immigrant parents who were anxious to preserve the traditions of their (Scandinavian) homelands while Continue reading →
Dear friends,
It’s April. I spent much of the Easter weekend wearing a t-shirt out to work in the gardens. It was glorious. Today, the forecast is for hail. Tomorrow? Snow.
Next week? Oh, I don’t know … dragon fire?
And still, it behooves us to be grateful for what we have. The world’s most corrosive force is not greed. It’s envy, which is driven by the sense that what we have just isn’t enough, and bitterness that others have more. That’s a theme that Charlie Munger reflected on repeatedly: “I have conquered envy in my own life. I don’t Continue reading →
Dear friends,
In like a lion, out like a lamb? The Total Stock Market Index has risen 12% in the past three months, as has the S&P 500. Nvidia stock is up 76% in the same period while semiconductor stocks inched up … 48%.
The thermometer in Davenport today topped 76 degrees, just a bit warm for a late winter day. We heard that participants in the March 1st Polar Plunges at locations across the upper Midwest had to be Continue reading →
Dear friends,
February is a fraught month, historically. For Romans, it once did not exist. And then it did, as the last month of the year, with the new year beginning when the crops were first sewn and all eyes looked to the future. Februalia, the festival of purification, was the last chance to put the misdeeds of the past behind us and to be prepared to build a future upon a solid foundation.
It’s also the month in which Augustana launches its Spring semester; as I ponder the snow piles on campus, I could imagine a more Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to the January issue of Mutual Fund Observer.
January was named after Janus, the tutelary deity of the year’s first month. As tutelary, he was guardian, patron, and protector. Absent from the Greek pantheon, Janus was the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. It was the “transitions” part that led Romans to place the two-faced god near entries and passageways, where he oversaw their comings and Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to December. Welcome to Winter. It’s my favorite time of the year, despite the post-Covid haze that has enveloped me all week. Augustana is increasingly festive, ringing with the sounds of holiday concerts and celebrations, as well as the definite “click” of another semester coming to its close. My students, with their hummingbird-like metabolisms, are loathe to surrender their shorts and sandals even now.
We annually share the same simple reminder. Winter has always been a dark and drear span. The weather turns against us, and we retreat inward for protection. Gardens lay frozen. Workdays are framed by darkness: dark when we arise, dark when we Continue reading →
Welcome to October, a fierce month!
It’s a month of apple harvests and Atlantic hurricanes (214 of them). Of a temperature roller coaster and of market crashes (1907, 1929, and 1987 – days with the word “Black” attached to their names, stand out). Of bonfires and of Great Fires (Mrs. O’Leary and her cow were framed, I tell ya). Of wars (from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 through the Second World War, October was always seen as your last chance for a quick land grab before wintry weather closed you down for the season) and rumors of wars (the Cuban Missile Crisis which, happily, didn’t trigger a global war in part because of President Kennedy’s familiarity with the political intransigence and misunderstanding that triggered the First World War). Of a thinning wall between the Here and the There and of Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to the end of the summer. And to the beginning of … the weakest month of the year for the stock market, with an average monthly loss of about 0.7%. And the threshold of the most volatile month of the year, October, which sees an intramonth movement of 8.3%; that is, since 1928, the record says that your portfolio will bounce 8.3% in October (but only 5.2% in February). My inbox overflows with apocalyptic forecasts and also of celebrations of The New Bull. Recognizing that it’s all bull of a sort, I move on.
Augustana welcomes the largest first-year class in its 163-year history, materially (and disconcertingly) fed by the Augustana Possible scholarships that Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Thanks so much for your patience. Chip and I spent a couple of weeks in the Scottish Highlands and Shetland Islands, and we knew in advance that that would slightly delay our August launch. Little did we understand the depth of Scottish generosity, as our hosts shared a case of COVID with us as we left the country. (It felt just like 2021 again!) The illness left us completely drained and endlessly exhausted, respectively. But we’ve now rallied and are delighted to share August with you. Continue reading →
Welcome to summer!
It’s really rare that acts of explosive deconstruction are the highlight of my month, but June was a special month. It welcomed summer and saw us bid farewell to a Quad Cities icon, the I-74 Twin Bridges.
Photo credit: Our friend, Roberta Osmers, Illuminated Scene Photography
The first span Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to summer.
Had I mentioned that I have the coolest job in the world? I love a challenge. Augustana offers them to me at the rate of sixty a week, approximately the number of students I work with. They often leave me stunned.
(See how important punctuation is? “They often leave me stunned” and “they often leave me, stunned” are two very different observations. Hmmm … both might be accurate, now that I think of it.)
My college started in 1860 with a very humble mission: it wanted to help the children of immigrants build a good Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Nominally Chip and I reside in the Quad Cities, whose t-shirts describe them as “twice as nice as the Twin Cities.” It’s a lovely and surprisingly diverse urban area with about 450,000 people and an agglomeration of two dozen small cities and towns. Half of us reside in Illinois, just south of the Mississippi River, and half in Iowa, on the river’s north bank.
The Mississippi River actually flows from east to west here. Recently, though, it has been flowing east, west, north, south, and, more than occasionally, up. As I write, the Mississippi is cresting at 22′, about five feet above the level at which we declare a major flood. People in Davenport take notice. That’s one Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Chip and I celebrated the start of Spring – or at least Augustana’s spring break – with a long sojourn to New Orleans. Our options were either a series of flights totaling about 10 hours or a 14-hour drive. For better and worse, we chose the latter, loaded the car with snacks, books, and music, and headed down the Mississippi from the Quad Cities to the Big Easy. The drive took us through seven states and one swath of utter destruction. The night before our passing, a tornado in Mississippi decapitated a forest adjacent to Interstate 55. Imagine, if you might, hundreds of mature trees either snapped off five feet above the ground or ripped up by their roots. It was spectacular and a sobering reminder of the price we’ll pay for a heating planet.
We ate well – she more Continue reading →
