No doubt about it. All of us here at Hill Investment Group are one team, regardless of whether we work out of St. Louis, Houston or wherever our clients want us to be. That said, we’re not without our civic pride. Let’s just say some of us more loudly cheer on the Astros, while others of us favor the Cardinals.

What else makes our home bases special in their own rights? We thought it would be fun to launch a series to share some of our cities’ favorite features and interesting oddities. We’ll start with a few points of historical pride.

History

• St. Louis – Founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, named after the 13^th Century French King Louis IX. Our famed Arch commemorates our reputation as the “Gateway to the West,” from where Lewis & Clark launched their 1804 expedition.
• Houston – Found in 1836 by brothers John and Augustus Allen, named after former General Sam Houston, a commander in the Texas Revolution for independence from Mexico. We’re probably best known for our oil and aerospace industries.

Famous Folk

• Houston – Jeff Bezos, Beyoncé, George H.W. and George W. Bush, A.J. Foyt, Howard Hughes, Dan Rather, Renée Zellweger.
• St. Louis – Maya Angelou, Yogi Berra, George Foreman, Redd Foxx, Ulysses S. Grant, Kevin Kline, Charles Lindbergh.

 Musical Heritage

• St. Louis – An early mecca for St. Louis blues, jazz, R&B and ragtime – Chuck Berry, Sheryl Crow, Miles Davis, Scott Joplin, and Ike & Tina Turner have called St. Louis home.
• Houston – Houston also hosts musicians across every genre – and who often cross multiple styles. Notables include Yolanda Adams, Clint Black, Lyle Lovett, Kenny Rogers and ZZ Top.

On Location (movies filmed or set in our home towns)

• Houston – “Apollo 13,” “Boyhood,” “Independence Day,” “Rushmore,” “Selena,” “Urban Cowboy.”
• St. Louis – “Escape from New York,” “Larger Than Life,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation,” “White Palace.”

Want to know more? In a future installment, we’ll share some of our favorite things to see, do, eat and drink in our respective home towns! And, by the way, if you’re ever visiting us in either locale, please let us know. We’d love to give you a grand tour of our favorite hot spots.

Have you ever wondered what Batman & Robin would be like if Batman were the understudy to a more famously popular Robin? It would probably be a lot like the real-life dynamic duo of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

As Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is the more familiar figure. He’s been featured in his own HBO special. He’s got his own “Oracle of Omaha” nickname. He’s chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Munger is vice-chair of the same, and often described as Buffett’s sidekick, even though he’s the elder of the two, is also an astute Omaha native, and was running his own successful holding company while Buffett was still learning the ropes. As Buffett himself describes of Munger:

“[W]e’ve never had an argument. When we differ, Charlie usually ends the conversation by saying: ‘Warren, think it over and you’ll agree with me because you’re smart and I’m right.’”

So who’s the real “Batman”? Let’s turn the spotlight on Munger for a change, showcasing some of his “elementary worldly wisdom” – a phrase Munger uses to describe how he builds models for converting isolated insights into applicable common sense.

Translating the complex into useful ideas. This is something we like to do here at Hill Investment Group as well. To get a sense of how a master like Munger does it, here’s a 15-minute YouTube video with excerpts from a talk on human psychology, which Munger delivered at Harvard in 1995.

Munger uses approachable analogies ranging from Pavlov’s dogs and New Coke, to target shooting and gallbladder surgery to entertain and inform us with “how humans trick themselves into making terrible errors of judgment.”

In our best judgment, Munger is well worth watching and reading, with plenty more elementary worldly wisdom to share. If that’s of interest, let us know and we’ll be glad to tell you more.

In my early years with Hill Investment Group, here’s a question I would see in people’s puzzled faces almost every time I mentioned fund manager Dimensional Fund Advisors:

“Dimensional who?”

With the continued shift to evidence-based investing, the question has become something more like this:

“Who’s this ‘Dimensional Fund Advisors’ I keep hearing about?”

The name may be more familiar these days, but with their nerdy academic underpinnings and publicity-shy approach, it’s still a challenge to explain exactly what makes the firm tick. As the firm’s Investment Research Committee Chair Ken French says, “People at Dimensional care much more about getting the right answer than defending their answer.”

Fortunately, Dimensional has created a great new piece entitled “Inside Dimensional 2017.” Equal parts science, philosophy, and intellectual horsepower, it offers a fascinating tour through the firm’s inner workings – including an entire section dedicated to its “Data Dogs” and their use of computers to revolutionize the implementation of finance for investors.

Let us know if you would enjoy a behind-the-scenes peek at Dimensional’s people and culture, and we’ll gladly send you a copy of “Inside Dimensional.”