Semper Augustus

Christopher Bloomstran

Christopher Bloomstran is the president and chief investment officer of Semper Augustus Investments Group, which he founded in 1998 at the height of the dot-com bubble. He studied finance at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he played defensive tackle on the football team, earned his CFA designation in 1994, and spent the years before going independent as a portfolio manager at UMB Investment Advisors, running trust offices in St. Louis and Denver and managing the Scout Balanced Fund from its inception in 1995. The firm's name is a quiet wink at financial mania. Semper Augustus is the rarest and most expensive tulip of the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s, and Bloomstran borrowed the name to remind himself how far price and value can drift apart. That lesson came from his mentor, Robert Smith, who moved to cash before the 1929 crash when he judged the gap between price and value to be unsustainable. Bloomstran put the idea to work in 1999, moving most of his anchor client's portfolio to cash ahead of the bust, a call that protected them through the collapse. Bloomstran runs concentrated portfolios of well-capitalized businesses trading below conservative estimates of intrinsic value, and he holds them for the long term rather than pushing for change. In the value-investing community he is best known for his exhaustive annual letters and for a sum-of-the-parts valuation of Berkshire Hathaway that dissects the company in unusual depth.