Semper Augustus Investments Group
medium confidence — compiled with source citation from the investment brain.
Semper Augustus Investments Group
Semper Augustus Investments Group
Semper Augustus Investments Group, LLC is an independent SEC-registered value boutique whose client letters are signed by Christopher P. Bloomstran (St. Louis) and Chad S Christensen (Highlands Ranch, Colorado). The corpus holds 21 letters (1999–2025), from the March 1999 energy letter through the 2025 annual letter.
Naming note (honesty flag). This page was requested under the name Eric Cinnamond, but the Semper Augustus corpus does not contain Eric Cinnamond. Cinnamond is a different small-cap value investor (Palm Valley Capital, formerly Intrepid Capital) associated with a yield-on-invested-capital framework; his letters are not in this archive. The 21 letters here are Bloomstran and Christensen's, and no quote below is Cinnamond's.
Philosophy: excellent businesses at reasonable prices
The firm states its mandate plainly: "our focus is to invest in excellent businesses at reasonable prices." Its method is bottom-up valuation against a two-part definition of intrinsic value — the discounted stream of future earnings available to the shareholder, and the price a rational buyer would pay for the entire firm in a private transaction. It treats risk as downside, not volatility: each investment is approached with reasonable expectations and constant attention to the risk of loss.
Contrarian at the 1999–2000 turn
The early letters are a case study in contrarian discipline. In March 1999 the firm bought oil service stocks at decade-low oil prices, on the argument that oil, as a depleting asset, is a necessary commodity in the world economy. In January 2000 it argued Microsoft — then the world's largest company by market capitalization — was "far too expensive", that "the stock is at least fifteen years ahead of the company", and held it out as "an example of the excesses in certain sectors of the stock market." The 2000 letter's fifteen-year predictions are a prediction artifact best read against the era, not as a 2026 market call (see crowd-behavior-episodes).
Cross-links
Semper Augustus is a small-cap value house in the Graham tradition — see quality-vs-statistical-cheap and what-has-worked-in-investing — whose intrinsic-value test is intrinsic-value and whose downside framing is permanent-loss-of-capital.
Investment philosophy
The compiled, source-grounded version of this investor's beliefs lives at investment philosophy.
Sources
investor-letters/SemperAugustus/Letters-Markdown/1999-03 - Client Letter.md (March 23, 1999)investor-letters/SemperAugustus/Letters-Markdown/2000-01 - Client Letter.md (January 1, 2000)