ii. Our approach
Aureus exists because the gap between what most people want to do with their money and what they actually do with it is enormous. This page explains, in some detail, how we think about closing it.
Aureus exists because the gap between what most people want to do with their money and what they actually do with it is enormous. This page explains, in some detail, how we think about closing it.
The investment industry is dominated by funds, banks, and trading platforms that charge heavily for the work of allocating capital, often serving the people inside the industry better than the people they exist to serve. We have built an algorithm that does that work systematically, sold as software at a price we think is fair. The premise of Aureus is that careful, rules-based investing should be available to people who do not already have access to it.
The industry has split itself, over the last decade, into two halves, both equally unhelpful. On one end, the world of professional fund management. Heavy with fees, light on transparency, and largely closed to ordinary people unless they are willing to hand over both their money and their judgement.
On the other end, the world of self-directed trading. Apps that gamify the markets, influencers selling the dream of financial independence, signals services that promise everything and deliver almost nothing. A world organised, in the end, around taking both your attention and your money.
Most people sit between these two ends and do nothing at all. Not because they do not want to invest, but because they have correctly worked out that both options look like bad deals. So they leave their money in savings accounts, lose to inflation quietly, and feel slightly guilty about it for years.
There is a third option. It is not a fund, and it is not a course. It is a piece of software that does, with discipline and without ego, the thing most people want done but do not want to do themselves. The rest of this page is about how we have tried to build it.
This is the foundation of how we operate, and it is not a marketing distinction. We do not manage money, recommend investments, or hold client funds. We are a piece of software. The strategy is yours to switch on or off, and the brokerage account is held in your name with a regulated provider.
What this means in practice is that your money never sits with us. It sits with your broker, in your name, protected by the regulatory framework that applies to that broker. We provide the software that does the work. Nothing about Aureus depends on you trusting us with capital, because we never have any of it.
A system that has been written down is a system that can be tested, audited, and improved. A system that lives in someone's head is a feeling. We do not sell feelings. We sell a set of rules, examined, refined, and committed to code.
This is what separates systematic investing from discretionary investing, and it is also why we think the systematic approach has, on average, served ordinary people better. A rule does not get tired, hungry, scared, or excited. A rule does not change its mind because the news is bad. It does the thing it was designed to do, repeatedly, and it can be inspected.
We think the single most underrated quality in investing is the ability to do nothing. The pressure to act is constant: from the news, from social media, from the part of one's own brain that confuses activity with progress. A piece of software, properly designed, is uniquely well-placed to resist that pressure.
We are not private about the way we think. Sam writes the longer-form material: essays on markets, commentary on the news, the occasional quarterly note that goes out to clients. The shorter, more current commentary lives on social media, where both of us show up regularly.
The strategy itself is not public. The reasoning, the work, the years of effort that have gone into it are not something we publish on the internet for free. But the way we think about markets is. If you want to know whether the people behind the software are worth your time, the writing is where to look. It is the part of the work we are willing to show.
